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% SiSU 4.0

@title: Free as in Freedom (2.0)
 :subtitle: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution

@creator:
 :author: Williams, Sam; Stallman, Richard M.

@date:
 :published: 2010

@rights:
 :copyright: Copyright (C) Sam Williams 2002; Copyright 2010 Richard M. Stallman
 :license: Published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License."

@classify:
 :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:biography;book:biography;copyright;GNU/Linux:GPL|copyleft|free software;free software;Software:Software Libré;GPL;Linux:GNU|Software Libré;programming

@links:
 { Home and Source }http://faifzilla.org/
 { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom:_Richard_Stallman%27s_Crusade_for_Free_Software
 { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596002874
 { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596002874

@make:
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% http://www.scribd.com/doc/55232810/Free-as-in-Freedom-Richard-Stallman

:A~ @title, Sam Williams, Second Edition Revisions by Richard M. Stallman

---#

1~pre2 [Publisher Information]

This is /{Free as in Freedom 2.0: Richard Stallman and the Free Soft-ware
Revolution}/ , a revision of /{Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade
for Free Software}/.

Copyright c 2002, 2010 Sam Williams \\ Copyright c 2010 Richard M. Stallman

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation;with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included
in the section entitled "GNUFree Documentation License."

Published by the Free Software Foundation \\
51 Franklin St., Fifth Floor \\
Boston, MA 02110-1335 \\
USA

ISBN: 9780983159216

The cover photograph of Richard Stallman is by Peter Hinely. The PDP-10
photograph in Chapter 7 is by Rodney Brooks. The photo-graph of St. IGNUcius in
Chapter 8 is by Stian Eikeland

--+#

1~  Foreword by Richard M. Stallman

I have aimed to make this edition combine the advantages of my knowledge and
Williams' interviews and outside viewpoint. The reader can judge to what extent
I have achieved this.

I read the published text of the English edition for the first time in 2009
when I was asked to assist in making a French translation of /{Free as in
Freedom}/. It called for more than small changes.

Many facts needed correction, but deeper changes were also needed. Williams, a
non-programmer, blurred fundamental technical and legal distinctions, such as
that between modifying an existing program's code, on the one hand, and
implementing some of its ideas in a new program, on the other. Thus, the first
edition said that both Gosmacs and GNU Emacs were developed by modifying the
original PDP-10 Emacs, which in fact neither one was. Likewise, it mistakenly
described Linux as a "version of Minix." SCO later made the same false claim in
its infamous lawsuit against IBM, and both Torvalds and Tanenbaum rebutted it.

The first edition over dramatized many events by projecting spurious emotions
into them. For instance, it said that I "all but shunned" Linux in 1992, and
then made a "a dramatic about-face" by deciding in 1993 to sponsor Debian
GNU/Linux. Both my interest in 1993 and my lack of interest in 1992 were
pragmatic means to pursue the same end: to complete the GNU system. The launch
of the GNU Hurd kernel in 1990 was also a pragmatic move directed at that same
end.

For all these reasons, many statements in the original edition were mistaken or
incoherent. It was necessary to correct them, but not straightforward to do so
with integrity short of a total rewrite, which was undesirable for other
reasons. Using explicit notes for the corrections was suggested, but in most
chapters the amount of change made explicit notes prohibitive. Some errors were
too pervasive or too in-grained to be corrected by notes. Inline or footnotes
for the rest would have overwhelmed the text in some places and made the text
hard to read; footnotes would have been skipped by readers tired of looking
down for them. I have therefore made corrections directly in the text.

However, I have not tried to check all the facts and quotations that are
outside my knowledge; most of those I have simply carried forward on Williams'
authority.

Williams' version contained many quotations that are critical of me. I have
preserved all these, adding rebuttals when appropriate.I have not deleted any
quotation, except in chapter 11where I have deleted some that were about open
source and did not pertain to my life or work. Likewise I have preserved (and
sometimes commented on) most of Williams' own interpretations that criticized
me, when they did not represent misunderstanding of facts or technology, but I
have freely corrected inaccurate assertions about my work and my thoughts and
feelings. I have preserved his personal impressions when presented as such, and
"I" in the text of this edition always refers to Williams except in notes
labeled "RMS:".

In this edition, the complete system that combines GNU and Linux is always
"GNU/Linux," and "Linux" by itself always refers to Torvalds' kernel, except in
quotations where the other usage is marked with "[sic]". \\ See
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html for more explanation of why it is
erroneous and unfair to call the whole system "Linux."

I would like to thank John Sullivan for his many useful criticisms and
suggestions.

1~ Preface by Sam Williams

This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the email exchange that set in motion
the writing of /{Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free
Software}/ and, by extension, the work prefaced here, /{Richard Stallman and
the Free Software Revolution}/.

Needless to say, a lot has changed over the intervening decade.

Originally conceived in an era of American triumphalism, the book's main
storyline - about one man's Jeremiah-like efforts to enlighten fellow software
developers as to the ethical, if not economic, shortsightedness of a commercial
system bent on turning the free range intellectual culture that gave birth to
computer science into a rude agglomeration of proprietary gated communities -
seems almost nostalgic, a return to the days when the techno-capitalist system
seemed to be working just fine, barring the criticism of a few outlying
skeptics.

Now that doubting the system has become almost a common virtue,it helps to look
at what narrative threads, if any, remained consistent over the last ten years.

While I don't follow the software industry as closely as I once did, one thing
that leaps out now, even more than it did then, is the ease with which ordinary
consumers have proven willing to cede vast swaths of private information and
personal user liberty in exchange for riding a top the coolest technology
"platform" or the latest networking trend.

A few years ago, I might have dubbed this the "iPod Effect," a shorthand salute
to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' unrivaled success in getting both the music
industry and digital music listeners to put aside years of doubt and mutual
animosity to rally around a single, sexy device - the Apple iPod - and its
restrictive licensing regime, iTunes. Were I pitching the story to a magazine
or newspaper nowadays, I'd probably have to call it the "iPad Effect" or maybe
the "Kindle Effect" both in an attempt to keep up with the evolving brand names
and to acknowledge parallel, tectonic shifts in the realm of daily journalism
and electronic book publishing.

Lest I appear to be gratuitously plugging the above-mentioned brand names, RMS
suggests that I offer equal time to a pair of websites that can spell out their
many disadvantages, especially in the realm of software liberty. I have agreed
to this suggestion in the spirit of equal time. The web sites he recommends are
DefectiveByDesign.org and BadVista.org.

Regardless of title, the notion of corporate brand as sole guarantor of
software quality in a swiftly changing world remains a hard one to dislodge,
even at a time when most corporate brands are trading at or near historic lows.

Ten years ago, it wasn't hard to find yourself at a technology conference
listening in on a conversation (or subjected to direct tutelage) in which some
old-timer, Richard Stallman included, offered a compelling vision of an
alternate possibility. It was the job of these old-timers, I ultimately
realized, to make sure we newbies in the journalism game recognized that the
tools we prided ourselves in finally knowing how to use - Microsoft Word,
PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, just to name a few popular offerings from a
single oft-cited vendor - were but a pale shadow of towering edifice the
original architects of the personal computer set out to build.

Nowadays, it's almost as if the opposite situation is at hand. The edifice is
now a sprawling ecosystem, a jungle teeming with ideas but offering only a few
stable niches for sustainable growth. While one can still find plenty of
hackers willing to grumble about, say, Vista's on going structural flaws,
Apple's dictatorial oversight of the iPhoneApp Store or Google's shifting
definition of the word "evil" - each year brings with it a fresh crop of
"digital native" consumers willing to trust corporate guidance in this
Hobbesian realm. Maybe that's because many of the problems that once made using
your desktop computer such a teeth-grinding experience have largely been paved
over with the help of free software.

Whatever. As consumer software reliability has improved, the race to stay one
step ahead of consumer taste has put application developers in an even tighter
embrace with moneyed interests. I'm not saying that the hacker ethos no longer
exists or that it has even weakened in any noticeable way. I'm just saying that
I doubt the programmer who generated the Facebook algorithm that rewrites the
"info" pages so that each keyword points to a sponsored page, with an
80-percent semantic error rate to boot, spends much time in his new Porsche
grousing about what the program really could have achieved if only the "suits"
hadn't gotten in the way.

True, millions of people now run mostly free software on their computers with
many running free software exclusively. From an ordinary consumer perspective,
however, terms like "software" and "computer" have become increasingly distant.
Many 2010-era cell phones could give a 2000-era laptop a run for its money in
the functionality department. And yet, when it comes time to make a cell phone
purchase, how many users lend any thought to the computer or software operating
system making that functionality possible? The vast majority of modern phone
users base their purchasing decisions almost entirely on the number of
applications offered, the robustness of the network and, most important of all,
the monthly service plan. Getting a consumer in this situation to view his or
her software purchase through the lens of personal liberty, as opposed to
personal convenience, is becoming, if not more difficult, certainly a more
complex endeavor.

Given this form of pessimistic introduction, why should anyone want go on and
read this book?

I can offer two major reasons.

The first reason is a personal one. As noted in the Epilogue of /{Free as in
Freedom}/, Richard and I parted on less than cordial terms shortly before the
publication of that book. The fault, in large part, was mine. Having worked
with Richard to make sure that my biographical sketch didn't run afoul of free
software principles - an effort that, I'm proud to say, made /{Free as in
Freedom}/ one of the first works to employ the GNU Free Documentation License
(GFDL) as a copyright mechanism - I abruptly ended the cooperative relationship
when it came time to edit the work and incorporate Richard' lengthy list of
error corrections and requests for clarification.

Though able to duck behind my own principles of authorial independence and
journalistic objectivity, I have since come to lament not begging the book's
publisher - O'Reilly and Associates - for additional time. Because O'Reilly had
already granted my one major stipulation - the GFDL - and had already put up
with a heavy stream of last-minute changes on my part, however, I was hesitant
to push my luck.

In the years immediately following the publication of /{Free as in Freedom}/, I
was able to justify my decision by noting that the GFDL, just like the GNU
General Public License in the software realm, makes it possible for any reader
to modify the book and resell it as a competitive work. As Ernest Hemingway
once put it, "the first draft of anything is shit." If Stallman or others
within the hacker community saw /{Free as in Freedom}/ as a first draft at
best, well, at least I had spared them the time and labor of generating their
own first draft.

Now that Richard has indeed delivered what amounts to a significant rewrite, I
can only but remain true to my younger self and endorse the effort. Indeed, I
salute it. My only remaining hope is that, seeing as how Richard's work doesn't
show any sign of slowing, additional documentation gets added to the mix.

Before moving on to the next reason, I should note that one of the pleasant
by-products of this book is a re-opening of email communication channels
between Richard and myself. The resulting communication has reacquainted me
with the razor-sharp Stallman writing style.

An illustrative and perhaps amusing anecdote for anyone out there who has
wrangled with Richard in text: In the course of discussing the passage in which
I observe and document the process of Richard losing his cool amid the rush
hour traffic of Kihei, Maui, a passage that served as the basis for Chapter 7
("A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell") in the original book, I acknowledged a
common complaint among the book's reviewers - namely, that the episode seemed
out of place, a fragment of magazine-style profile interrupting a book-length
biography. I told Richard that he could discard the episode for that reason
alone but noted that my decision to include it was based on two justifications.
First, it offered a glimpse of the Stallman temper, something I'd been warned
about but had yet to experience in a first hand manner. Second, I felt the
overall scene possessed a certain metaphorical value. Hence the chapter title.
Stallman, to my surprise, agreed on both counts. His concern lay more in the
two off-key words. At one point I quote him accusing the lead driver of our
two-vehicle caravan with "deliberately" leading us down a dead-end street, an
accusation that, if true, suggested a level of malice outside the bounds of the
actual situation. Without the benefit of a recorded transcript - I only had a
notebook at the time, I allowed that it was likely I'd mishandled Stallman's
actual wording and had made it more hurtful than originally intended.

On a separate issue, meanwhile, Stallman questioned his quoted use of the word
"fucking." Again, I didn't have the moment on tape, but I wrote back that I
distinctly recalled an impressive display of profanity, a reminder of Richard's
New York roots, and was willing to stand by that memory.

An email response from Richard, received the next day, restated the critique in
a way that forced me to go back and re-read the first message. As it turned
out, Stallman wasn't so much objecting to the "fuck" as the "-ing" portion of
the quote.

"Part of the reason I doubt [the words] is that they involve using fucking as
an adverb," Stallman wrote. "I have never spoken that way. So I am sure the
words are somewhat altered."

"Touch'e".

The second reason a person should feel compelled to read this book cycles back
to the opening theme of this preface - how different a future we face in 2010
compared to the one we were still squinting our eyes to see back in 2000. I ll
be honest: Like many Americans (and non-Americans), my world view was altered
by the events of September 11, 2001, so much so that it wasn't much longer
after the publication of /{Free as in Freedom}/ that my attention drifted
sharply away from the free software movement and Stallman's efforts to keep it
on course. While I have managed to follow the broad trends and major issues,
the day-to-day drama surrounding software standards, software copyrights and
software patents has become something I largely skip over - the Internet news
equivalent of the Water Board notes in the local daily newspaper, in other
words.

[RMS: The September 2001 attacks, not mentioned later in the book, deserve
brief comment here. Far from "changing everything," as many proclaim, the
attacks have, in fact, changed very little in the U.S.: There are still
scoundrels in power who hate our freedoms. The only major difference is that
they can now cite "terrorists" as an excuse for laws to take them away. See the
political notes on stallman.org for more about this.]

This is a lamentable development in large part because, ten years in, I finally
see the maturing 21st century in what I believe to be a clear light. Again, if
this were a pitch letter to some editor, I'd call it "The Process Century."

By that I mean I we stand at a rare point in history where, all cynicism aside,
the power to change the world really does delegate down to the ordinary
citizen's level. The catch, of course, is that the same power that belongs to
you also belongs to everyone else. Wherein past eras one might have secured
change simply by winning the sympathies of a few well-placed insiders, today's
reformer must bring into alignment an entire vector field of competitive ideas
and interests. In short, being an effective reformer nowadays requires more
than just titanic stamina and a willingness to cry out in the wilderness for a
decade or more, it requires knowing how to articulate durable, scalable ideas,
how to beat the system at its own game.

On all counts, I would argue that Richard M. Stallman, while maybe not the
archetype, is at the very least an ur-type of the successful reformer just
described.

While some might lament a future in which every problem seems to take a few
decades of committee meetings and sub-committee hearings just to reach the
correction stage, I, for one, see the alternative - a future so responsive to
individual or small group action that some self-appointed actor finally decides
to put that responsiveness to the test- as too chilling to contemplate.

In short, if you are the type of person who, like me, hopes to seethe 21st
century follow a less bloody course than the 20th century, the Water Board - in
its many frustrating guises - is where that battle is currently being fought.
As hinted by the Virgil-inspired epigraph introducing the book's first chapter,
I've always held out hope that this book might in some way become a sort of
epic poem for the Internet Age. Built around a heroic but flawed central
figure, its authorial stamp should be allowed to blur with age.

On that note, I would like to end this preface the same way I always end this
preface - with a request for changes and contributions from any reader wishing
to improve the text. Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation License offers a guide
on your rights as a reader to submit changes, make corrections, or even create
your own spin-off version of the book. If you prefer to simply run the changes
through Richard or myself, you can find the pertinent contact information on
the Free Software Foundation web site. In the meantime, good luck and enjoy the
book!

group{

Sam Williams
Staten Island,
USA

}group

1~ Chapter 1 - For Want of a Printer

code{

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

}code

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.
={ AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) ;
   MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
}

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 a fast 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.
={ Xerox Corporation +10 :
     Palo Alto Research Center
}

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 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.

Once the machine was in use, its flaws began to surface. Chief among the
drawbacks was the machine's 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 it had really been printed.

Stallman was hardly the only AI Lab denizen to notice the problem, but he also
thought of a remedy. Years before, for the lab's previous printer, Stallman had
solved a similar problem by modifying the software program that regulated the
printer, on a small PDP-11machine, as well as the Incompatible Timesharing
System that ran on the main PDP-10 computer. Stallman couldn't eliminate paper
jams, but he could insert software code that made the PDP-11 check the printer
periodically, and report jams back to the PDP-10. Stallman also inserted code
on 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 that one of them would fix it
forthwith.
={ PDP-10 computer ;
   PDP-11 computer
}

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.
For a hacker, writing a software program that worked was only the beginning. A
hacker would try to display his cleverness (and impress other hackers) by
tackling an additional challenge: to make the program particularly fast, small,
powerful, elegant, or somehow impressive in a clever way.~{ For more on the
term "hacker," see Appendix A - Hack, Hackers, and Hacking. }~

Companies like Xerox made it a policy to donate their products(and software) to
places where hackers typically congregated. If hackers used these products,
they might go to work for the company later on. In the 60s and early 70s, they
also sometimes developed programs that were useful for the manufacturer to
distribute to other customers.
={ hackers :
     philosophy of donating software +7 ;
   software :
     companies donating ;
   source code :
     Xerox Corporation publishing +32
}

When Stallman noticed the jamming tendency in the Xerox laser printer, he
thought of applying the old fix or "hack" to this printer. 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 only in compiled, or binary, form. If
programmers looked at the files, all they would see was an endless stream of
ones and zeroes - gibberish.
={ Xerox Corporation :
     source code, publishing +31 ;
   text file source code, publishing ;
   binary files
}

There are programs, called "disassemblers," to convert the ones and zeroes into
low-level machine instructions, but figuring out what those instructions
actually "do" is a long and hard task, known as "reverse engineering." To
reverse engineer this program could have taken more time than five years' worth
of jammed printouts. Stallman wasn't desperate enough for that, so he put the
problem aside.

Xerox's unfriendly policy contrasted blatantly with the usual practices of the
hacker community. For instance, to develop the program for the PDP-11 that ran
the old printer, and the program for another PDP-11 that handled display
terminals, the AI Lab needed a cross-assembler program to build PDP-11 programs
on the PDP-10 main computer. The lab's hackers could have written one, but
Stallman, a Harvard student, found such a program at Harvard's computer lab.
That program was written to run on the same kind of computer, the PDP-10,
albeit with a different operating system. Stallman never knew who had written
the program, since the source code did not say. But he brought a copy back to
the AI Lab. He then altered the source code to make it run on the AI Lab's
Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). With no muss and little fuss, the AI Lab
got the program it needed for its software infrastructure. Stallman even added
a few features not found in the original version, making the program more
powerful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman says.
={ Harvard University :
     computer labs +2 ;
   AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) :
     borrowing source code for
}

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 anyone else
of the use of the program. If anything, other hackers gained in the process,
because Stallman had introduced additional features that other hackers were
welcome to borrow back. For instance, Stallman recalls a programmer at the
private engineering firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program. He
made it run on Twenex and added a few additional features, which Stallman
eventually reintegrated into the AI Lab's own source-code archive. The two
programmers decided to maintain a common version together, which had the code
to run either on ITSor on Twenex at the user's choice.
={ Bolt, Beranek & Newman engineering firm }

"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 themid-1970s.'"

Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the AI Lab and
other places built up robust creations. 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?

This system of cooperation was being undermined by commercial secrecy and
greed, leading to peculiar combinations of secrecy and co-operation. For
instance, computer scientists at UC Berkeley had built up a powerful operating
system called BSD, based on the Unix system they had obtained from AT&T.
Berkeley made BSD available for the cost of copying a tape, but would only give
these tapes to schools that could present a $50,000 source license obtained
from AT&T. The Berkeley hackers continued to share as much as AT&T let them,
but they had not perceived a conflict between the two practices.
={ AT&T ;
   Multics operating system ;
   UC Berkeley :
     building Unix ;
   Unix operating system ;
   BSD
}

Likewise, Stallman was annoyed that Xerox had not provided the source-code
files, but not yet angry. He never thought of asking Xerox for a copy. "They
had already given us the laser printer," Stallman says. "I could not say they
owed us something more. Besides, I took for granted that the absence of source
code reflected an intentional decision, and that asking them to change it would
be futile."

Good news eventually arrived: word had it that a scientist at the
computer-science department at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of the
laser printer source code.
={ Carnegie Mellon University +17 }

The association with Carnegie Mellon did not augur well. In 1979, Brian Reid, a
doctoral student there, had shocked the community by refusing to share his
text-formatting program, dubbed Scribe. This text formatter was the first to
have mark-up commands oriented to-wards the desired semantics (such as
"emphasize this word" or "this paragraph is a quotation") rather than low-level
formatting details("put this word in italics" or "narrow the margins for this
paragraph"). Instead Reid sold 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.(Why one would consider
such an outcome particularly undesirable is not clear.) 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
anti-feature.
={ Unilogic software company +1 ;
   time bombs, in software ;
   Scribe text-formatting program +1 ;
   anti-feature
}

For Stallman, this 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. But he
didn't think deeply about the question, since he didn't use Scribe much.

Unilogic gave the AI Lab a gratis copy to use, but did not remove or mention
the time bomb. It worked, for a while; then one day a user reported that Scribe
had stopped working. System hacker Howard Cannon spent hours debugging the
binary until he found the time-bomb and patched it out. Cannon was incensed,
and wasn't shy about telling the other hackers how mad he was that Unilogic had
wasted his time with an intentional bug.

Stallman had a Lab-related reason, a few months later, to visit the Carnegie
Mellon campus. During that visit, he made a point of looking for the person
reported to have the printer software source code. By good fortune, the man was
in his office.

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 that he wanted to modify. To his chagrin,
the researcher refused.

"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 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 who was 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.
={ Xerox Corporation :
     PARC | Palo Alto Research Center ;
   Sproull, Robert (Xerox PARC researcher) ;
   Sun Laboratories
}

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."

"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. If so, that might indicate a mis-understanding that occurred,
since Stallman wanted the source for the program that MIT had used for quite
some time, not some newer version. But the question of which version never
arose in the brief conversation.

In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident,
noting that the man's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a
nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between him and the Xerox
Corporation giving the signatory access to 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."
={ NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) :
     for source code +13 ;
   nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) :
     for source code +13
}

For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a refusal on
the part of some CMU researcher to participate in a society 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. In the first moment, he could only seethe refusal in a personal context. "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. I went to his
office expecting him to cooperate, so I had not thought about how I would
respond if he refused. When he did, I was stunned speechless as well as
disappointed and angry."

Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, and Stallman presents the
event as one that made him confront an ethical issue, though not the only such
event on his path. 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 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."

Stallman later explained, "If he had refused me his cooperation for personal
reasons, it would not have raised any larger issue. I might have considered him
a jerk, but no more. The fact that his refusal was impersonal, that he had
promised in advance to be uncooperative, not just to me but to anyone
whatsoever, made this a larger issue."

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. He said, "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. After this experience, I started to
recognize what the issue was, and how big it was."

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.

Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab's network,
however, something had changed. The machine worked fine, barring the paper
jams, but the ability to modify software according to personal taste or
community need had been taken away. From the viewpoint of the software
industry, the printer software represented a change in business tactics.
Software had become such a valuable asset that companies no longer accepted 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, software
that users could not change and redistribute - 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.
={ proprietary software }

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 anger 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 such future offers with
suspicion, it also forced him to turn the situation around: 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?

"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.'"

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. They may have told
themselves that this was a necessary evil so they could work on the best
projects. For Stallman, however, the NDA called the moral legitimacy of the
project into question. What good is a technically exciting project if it is
meant to be withheld from the community?

As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such offers 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. 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 material comforts 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 as I had been a
victim."

1~ Chapter 2 - 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.
={ Warren Weaver Hall +2 ;
   New York University computer science department +44
}

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-haired 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), co-recipient
of the Takeda Foundation's 2001 Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment,
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.
={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) +1 ;
   FSF (Free Software Foundation) ;
   GNU General Public License +1 ;
   GNU Project :
     web site for ;
   GPL +1 ;
   MacArthur Fellowship Program ;
   Microsoft Corporation +8
}

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 GNU General Public License, or GNU
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 establishes a form of communal
ownership - what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons" -
through the legal weight of copyright. The GPL makes this irrevocable; once an
author gives code to the community in this way, that code can't be made
proprietary by anyone else. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright
license, if they use a substantial amount of the original source code. For this
reason, critics of the GPL have taken to calling it a "viral" license,
suggesting inaccurately that it spreads itself to every software program it
touches.~{ Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent: just putting
your code in the same computer with a GPL-covered program does not put your
code under the GPL. "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. }~
={ Mundie, Craig +2 ;
   NYU Stern School of Business ;
   Stern School of Business (NYU)
}

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 derided it as "software socialism" have come around to
recognize the benefits. Linux, the kernel developed by Finnish college student
Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are most parts of the GNU
system: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these
tools form the components of the free software GNU/Linux 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.~{ Although these applications run on GNU/Linux, it does not
follow that they are themselves free software. On the contrary, most of them
applications are proprietary software, and respect your freedom no more than
Windows does. They may contribute to the success of GNU/Linux, but they don't
contribute to the goal of freedom for which it exists. }~
={ C Compiler (GNU) ;
   GNU Debugger (GDB) ;
   GDB (GNU Debugger) ;
   Debugger ;
   Emacs text editor ;
   GNU Emacs ;
   GNU C Compiler (GCC) +9 ;
   GCC (GNU C Compiler) ;
   Hewlett Packard :
     free software community and ;
   IBM :
     free software community and ;
   Linux ;
   Torvalds, Linus ;
   Sun Microsystems :
     free software community and
}

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 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. Each program in the Windows
colossus is covered by copyrights and contracts (End User License Agreements,
or EULAs) asserting the proprietary status of the executable, as well as the
underlying source code that users can't get anyway. Incorporating code
protected by the "viral" GPL into one of these programs is forbidden; to comply
with the GPL's requirements, Microsoft would be legally required to make that
whole program free software. Rival companies could then copy, modify, and sell
improved versions of it, taking away the basis of Microsoft's lock over the
users.
={ Windows (Microsoft) :
     source code and ;
   open source :
     software development, approach to ;
   Redmond (Washington)
}

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. (Microsoft does not even acknowledge the term
"free software," preferring to use its attacks to direct attention towards the
apolitical "open source" camp described in chapter 11, and away from the free
software movement.) 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, which
dominates the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup.
IBM, the company then regarded as the most powerful force in the computer
hardware industry, had yet 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.
={ Amazon.com ;
   AOL (America OnLine) ;
   Compaq computers ;
   Dell computers ;
   PCs (personal computers) ;
   personal computers (PCs)
}

Among those who value progress above freedom, the fact that the high-technology
marketplace has come so far in such little time is cited both for and against
the GNU GPL. Some argue in favor of the GPL, pointing 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," Gi-galaw.com
(January, 2000), \\ http://www.gigalaw.com/. }~ The proprietary software
environment, they say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies
suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative
startups. Others 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 proprietary software licenses, not to mention the economic
prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a break-through technology
that launches an entirely new market),~{ Killer apps don't have to be
proprietary. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace
is like the lottery. The bigger the potential pay-off, 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), \\ http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/5893.html. }~ companies lose
the incentive to participate. Once again, the market stagnates and innovation
declines. As Mundie himself noted in his May 3rd 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:
={ Mundie, Craig +3 }

_1 It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector
because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis
where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of
distribution.~{ See Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice
president, Microsoft Corp., excerpted from an online transcript of Mundie's May
3, 2001, speech to the New York University Stern School of Business, \\
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp. }~

The mutual success of GNU/Linux and Windows over the last 10years suggests that
both sides on this question are sometimes right. However, free software
activists such as Stallman think this is a side issue. The real question, they
say, isn't whether free or proprietary software will succeed more, it's which
one is more ethical.

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 impressive track
record during that period, Mundie advised listeners to not get too carried away
by the free software movement's recent momentum:
={ GNU Project :
     Linux and, mutual success of ;
   Linux :
     GNU Project and ;
   third-party software developers supporting Microsoft
}

_1 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.~{ /{Ibid.}/ }~

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.

Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a seat in
a front-row chair, tapping 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, co-director of the Stern School's Center for Advanced Technology,
provides the first.
={ Uretsky, Mike +5 }

"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.
={ Schonberg, Ed. +2 }

"Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started
thinking globally [about] problems concerning the un-availability 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."~{ If this were to be said today, Stallman would object to the term
"intellectual property" as carrying bias and confusion. \\ See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html. }~

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,~{ The
acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29,
2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin: \\ 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. }~ 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."
={ Columbia University ;
   Moglen, Eben +2
}

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 codewords 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?'"

1~ Chapter 3 - A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
={ Stallman, Richard M. :
     childhood +61
}

Richard Stallman's mother, Alice Lippman, still remembers the moment she
realized her son had a special gift.
={ Lippman, Alice +60 }

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

The year was 1961, and Lippman, a recently divorced single mother, was whiling
away a weekend afternoon within the family's tiny one-bedroom apartment on
Manhattan's Upper West Side. Leafing throug ha copy of Scientific American,
Lippman came upon her favorite section, the Martin Gardner-authored column
titled "Mathematical Games." A substitute art teacher at the time, Lippman
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."
={ Lippman, Maurice }

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.'"~{ One of the major background sources
for this chapter was the interview "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit,
Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius" by Michael Gross, author
of the 1999 book Talking About My Generation , a collection of interviews with
notable personalities from the so-called "Baby Boom" generation. Although
Stallman did not make it into the book, Gross published the interview as an
online supplement to the book's web site. The URL for the interview has changed
several times since I first came across it. According to various readers who
have gone searching for it, you can now find the interview at \\
http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html. }~
={ University of Glasgow }

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?'"~{ RMS: I don't remember
telling her this. All I can say is I strongly disagree with those views now.
When I was in my teens, I lacked compassion for the difficulties most people
encounter in life; my problems were different. I did not appreciate how the
wealthy will reduce most people to poverty unless we organize at all levels to
stop them. I did not understand how hard it is for most people to resist social
pressure to do foolish things, such as spend all their money instead of saving,
since I hardly even noticed the pressure myself. In addition, unions in the
60s, when they were very powerful, were sometimes arrogant or corrupt. But they
are much weaker today, and the result is that economic growth, when it occurs,
benefits mainly the rich. }~

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.
={ Stallman, Daniel }

"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." To be required to choose a specific topic when there was
nothing he actually wanted to write about was almost impossible for Stallman,
and painful enough to make him go to great lengths to avoid such situations.

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 memory 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." Stallman doesn't remember the incident, but thinks it more likely that
he was anguished because he didn't have anything to show.

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 Unit as,
Stallman played spaceman. "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."~{ /{Ibid.}/ }~ Stallman was not ashamed of his weird
characteristics, distinguishing them from the social ineptness that he did
regard as a failing. However, both contributed together to his social
exclusion.

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.
={ Columbia University ;
   Science Honors Program (Columbia) +2
}

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."
={ Chess, Dan ;
   Hunter College
}

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.
={ Breidbart, Seth +1 }

"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. Stallman
also speculates about this. In the interview for a 2000 profile for the
/{Toronto Star}/, Stallman said he wondered if he were "borderline autistic."
The article inaccurately cited the speculation as a certainty.~{ 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. }~
={ Asperger Syndrome +1 ;
   autism +5 ;
   Geek Syndrome, The (Silberman) +1 ;
   Wired magazine ;
   Toronto Star ;
   Silberman, Steve +1 ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     behavioral disorders +1
}

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), \\ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html. }~
={ Stallman, Richard M. :
     childhood, behavioral disorders
}

"It's possible I could have had something like that," Stallman 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." Another possibility is that Stallman had a
"shadow syndrome" which goes someway in the direction of Asperger's syndrome
but without going beyond the limits of normality.~{ See John Ratey and
Catherine Johnson, "Shadow Syndromes." }~

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."
={ Chess, Dan }

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 over-sensitivity 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?'"
={ divorce of Alice and Daniel Stallman ;
   Stallman, Daniel
}

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
died 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 fight the Nazis in France. 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. One died when he was 8,
and the other when he was 10. 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 his sense of exclusion. "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 an 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 came to have a distinctly off-the-wall personality that
met with 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 lent
Stallman a manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 8th or 9th year. To a
pre teenager 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 Gross (1999): "As soon as I
heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play with one." }~ Soon,
Stallman was writing out programs on paper in the instructions of the 7094.
There was no computer around to run them on, and he had no real applications to
use one for, but he yearned to write a program - any program whatsoever. He
asked the counselor for arbitrary suggestions of something to code.
={ IBM 7094 computer +1 }

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 chance
finally came during his senior year of high school. The IBM New York Scientific
Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, offered Stallman
the chance to try to write his first real program. His fancy was to write a
pre-processor for the programming language PL/I, designed to add the tensor
algebra summation convention as a feature to the language. "I first wrote it in
PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the compiled PL/I program
was too big to fit in the computer," he recalls.
={ assembler language ;
   IBM :
     New York Scientific Center ;
   IBM New York Scientific Center ;
   PL/I programming language ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     childhood, first computer program
}

For the summer after high-school graduation, the New York Scientific Center
hired him. Tasked with writing a numerical analysis program in Fortran, he
finished that in a few weeks, acquiring such a distaste for the Fortran
language that he vowed never to write any-thing in it again. Then he spent the
rest of the summer writing a text-editor in APL.

Simultaneously, 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."
={ Rockefeller University }

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 teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. Kids, for the most part,
didn't. At least not in the same way."
={ Breidbart, Seth }

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.
={ Harvard University +7 ;
   MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
}

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 public summer school downtown and
began making up the mandatory humanities classes he had shunned earlier in his
high-school career.
={ Louis D. Brandeis High School +3 }

By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York City
high-school students, at Louis D. Brandeis High School on on West 84th Street.
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 High, 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
10 months at Brandeis as the fourth-ranked student in a class of 789.

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."
={ Breidbart, Seth +1 }

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.'"

1~ Chapter 4 - 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, Mac Arthur-certified Genius" (1999). }~ Like most
Americans during the Eisenhower age, the Stallman family spent the Fifties
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."
={ Lippman, Alice :
     political identity of +11
}

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.
={ Stallman, Daniel }

"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."
={ Elmhurst (New York) ;
   Queens public library
}

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 sky-rocketing demand for post-war
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.
={ Hunter College }

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."
={ Democratic party +3 }

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.
={ Woodrow Wilson/FDR Reform Democratic Club ;
   Tammany Hall +1
}

"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."
={ DeSapio, Carmine }

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 Democrat elected to Congress with the
help of reform clubs and one of the first U.S. representatives to speak out
against the Vietnam War.
={ Vietnam War +10 ;
   Ryan, William Fitts
}

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."
={ Indochina }

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 being
drafted as the war lasted into the 1970s.
={ Lippman, Andrew ;
   Lippman, Maurice ;
   MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
}

"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. He did not think he could get through it and emerge sane.
={ draft (Vietnam War) +6 }

"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 16th birthday
earned him a low number in the dreaded draft lottery. This did not affect him
immediately, since he had a college deferment, one of the last before the U.S.
stopped granting them; but it would affect him in a few years. "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 impressed by the family members who did speak out.
Recalling a sticker, printed and distributed by his father, 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."

However, Stallman says he was turned off by the tone and direction of much of
that 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 important. 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, slogans like "make love not
war" had a taunting quality. Stallman did not want to make war, at least not in
Southeast Asia, but nobody was inviting him to make love either.
={ Beatles ;
   Hoffman, Abbie ;
   Rubin, Jerry ;
   Science Honors Program (Columbia)
}

"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman recalls. "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 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 extremes of the anti-war
movement in purely logical terms. Doing so, Stallman 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.

In the 1980s, a more confident Stallman decided to make up for his past
inactivity by participating in mass rallies for abortion rights in Washington
DC. "I became dissatisfied with my earlier self for failing in my duty to
protest the Vietnam War," he explains.

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." At Harvard, he could go to his room and have
peace whenever he wanted it. Peers who watched Stallman make the transition,
however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience.
={ Harvard University +22 }

"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."
={ Chess, Dan ;
   Science Honors Program (Columbia) +1
}

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."
={ Math 55 (Harvard University) +9 }

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."
={ Harbater, David +2 ;
   University of Pennsylvania
}

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20by 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.
={ Breidbart, Seth +14 }

"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," 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."
={ Hunter College }

For Chess, it was a troubling moment. Like a bird flying into a clear glass
window, it would take a while to realize that some levels of insight were
simply off limits.

"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."~{ Stallman doubts this, however. "One of the reasons I moved
from math and physics to programming is that I never learned how to discover
anything new in the former two. I only learned to study what others had done.
In programming, I could do something useful every day." }~

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. "How else would we be able to see what the world is like
200 years from now?" Curious, he began asking various acquaintances whether
they would want immortality if offered it. "I was shocked that most people
regarded immortality as a bad thing." Many said that death was good because
there was no use living a decrepit life, and that aging was good because it got
people prepared for death, without recognizing the circularity of the
combination.

Although perceived as a first-rank mathematician and first-rate in-formal
debater, Stallman shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have
sealed his brilliant reputation. Near the end of fresh-man 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 ac hance 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.
={ Putnam exam +1 }

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 skipped 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 and
feared the notion of head-to-head competition - so why not just avoid it?

"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 and losing
that I would start making stupid mistakes very early in the game. The fear
became a self-fulfilling prophecy." He avoided the problem by not playing
chess.

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
the machine specifications to learn about the range of different computer
designs.

One day, near the end of his freshman year, Stallman heard about a special
laboratory near MIT. The laboratory was located on the ninth floor of a
building in Tech Square, the mostly-commercial office park MIT had built across
the street from the campus. 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 to match.
={ artificial intelligence ;
   MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology :
     first visit to +2
}

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 inter-connected office buildings, the
Institute's campus offered an aestheticy in to Harvard's spacious
colonial-village yang. Of the two, the maze of MIT was much more Stallman's
style. 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 atmosphere of "look but don't touch." Instead, Stallman
found only a collection of open terminals and robotic arms, presumably the
artifacts of some AI experiment. 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," he adds wryly, referring to hackers' tendency to move on
to a new project without documenting the last one.
={ AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) +40 }

Stallman left with something even better than a manual: A job. His first
project was to write a PDP-11 simulator that would run on a PDP-10. He came
back to the AI Lab the next week, grabbing an available terminal, and began
writing the 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 sometimes had to wait for
hours. 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 irrational waste. Although Stallman continued to pay 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."
={ Harvard University :
     computer labs
}

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 re-search 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
AI 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. }~
={ Dreyfus, Hubert ;
   Gosper, Bill ;
   Greenblat, Richard ;
   LIFE mathematical game ;
   LISP programming language ;
   MacHack ;
   Project MAC ;
   Sussman, Gerald +2
}

Members of the tight-knit group called themselves "hackers." Overtime, 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."
In their fascination with exploring the limits of what they could make a
computer do, hackers might sit at a terminal for 36 hours straight if
fascinated with a challenge. Most importantly, they demanded access to the
computer (when no one else was using it) and the most useful information about
it. 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.
={ ethics of hacking ;
   hackers +7 :
     ethics of
}

Stallman also learned the lore, stories of how hackers, when presented with an
obstacle, had circumvented it in creative ways. This included various ways that
hackers had opened professors' offices to "liberate" sequestered terminals.
Unlike their pampered Harvard counterparts, MIT faculty members knew better
than to treat the AI Lab's limited stock of terminals as private property. If a
faculty member made the mistake of locking away a terminal for the night,
hackers were quick to make the terminal accessible again - and to remonstrate
with the professor for having mistreated the community. Some hackers did this
by picking locks ("lock hacking"), some by removing ceiling tiles and climbing
over the wall. On the 9th floor, with its false floor for the computers'
cables, some spelunked under it. "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 story. According to
Sussman, the hackers never broke any doors to retrieve terminals. }~ Stallman
says.
={ AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) :
     lock hacking at +31
}

The hackers' insistence served a useful purpose by preventing the professors
from egotistically obstructing the lab's work. The hackers did not disregard
people's particular needs, but insisted that these be met in ways that didn't
obstruct everyone else. For instance, professors occasionally said they had
something in their offices which had to be protected from theft. The hackers
responded, "No one will object if you lock your office, although that's not
very friendly, as long as you don't lock away the lab's terminal in it."

Although the academic people greatly outnumbered the hackers in the AI Lab, the
hacker ethic prevailed. The hackers were the lab staff and students who had
designed and built parts of the computers, and written nearly all the software
that users used. They kept everything working, too. Their work was essential,
and they refused to be downtrodden. They worked on personal pet projects as
well as features users had asked for, but sometimes the pet projects revolved
around improving the machines and software 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-10 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 system 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, AI researchers
soon had it to themselves. Using ITS and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had
been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman's
arrival.~{ Ibid. }~
={ Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) ;
   CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System) ;
   IBM 7094 computer ;
   Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) +5 ;
   PDP-6 computer +1 ;
   Project MAC :
     Incompatible Time Sharing system and
}

By 1971, ITS had moved to the newer but compatible PDP-10, leaving the PDP-6
for special stand-alone uses. The AI PDP-10 had a very large memory for 1971,
equivalent to a little over a megabyte;in the late 70s it was doubled. Project
MAC had bought two other PDP-10s; all were located on the 9th floor, and they
all ran ITS. The hardware-inclined hackers designed and built a major hardware
addition for these PDP-10s, implementing paged virtual memory, a feature
lacking in the standard PDP-10.~{ 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 some non-hackers, ITS boasted features most commercial operating
systems wouldn't offer for years (or even to this day), features such as
multitasking, applying the debugger immediately to any running program, and
full-screen editing capability.

"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." This was convenient
not only for debugging, but also for programs to start, stop or control other
programs.

Another favorite feature would allow the one program to freeze an-other
program's job cleanly, between instructions. In other operating systems,
comparable operations might stop the program in the middle of a system call,
with internal status that the user could not see and that had no well-defined
meaning. In ITS, this feature made sure that monitoring the step-by-step
operation of a program was reliable and consistent.

"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
(explicitly visible) status of the job and continue it, and later change it
back, everything would be consistent. There was no hidden status anywhere."

Starting in September 1971, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of
Stallman's weekly school schedule. From Sunday through Friday, Stallman was at
Harvard. As soon as Friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the subway,
heading down to MIT for the weekend. Stallman usually made sure to arrive well
before 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 hour or so, 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, or perhaps go to Chinatown again at 3
a.m.

Stallman might stay up all morning hacking, or might sleep Saturday morning on
a couch. On waking he would hack some more, have another Chinese dinner, then
go back to Harvard. Sometimes he would stay through Sunday as well. These
Chinese dinners were not only delicious; they also provided sustenance lacking
in the Harvard dining halls, where on the average only one meal a day included
anything he could stomach. (Breakfast did not enter the count, since he didn't
like most breakfast foods and was normally asleep at that hour.)

For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was
a heady experience to be 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. }~
={ Swedish Royal Technical Institute }

The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker
world view. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began
to infuse his actions with a sense of communal duty. When others violated the
communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first
visit, Stallman was the one opening locked offices 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.
One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt,
involved bending a stiff wire into several right angles and attaching a strip
of tape to one end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and
rotate the wire so that the tape touched the inside doorknob. Provided the tape
stuck, a hacker could turn the doorknob by pulling the handle formed from the
outside end of the wire.
={ Greenblat, Richard :
     lock-hacking and
}

When Stallman tried the trick, he found it hard to execute. Getting the tape to
stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the
doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman thought about another method:
sliding away ceiling tiles to climb over the wall. This always worked, if there
was a desk to jump down onto, but it generally covered the hacker in itchy
fiberglass. Was there a way to correct that flaw? Stallman considered an
alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a
hacker slid away two ceiling panels and reached over the wall with a wire?

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 with a short U of adhesive
tape attached sticky-side-up at the base. Reaching across over the door jamb,
he dangled the tape until it looped under the inside doorknob. Lifting the tape
until the adhesive stuck, he then pulled on one end of the tape, thus turning
the doorknob. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to
the art of getting into a locked room.

"Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the doorknob," says
Stallman, recalling a slight imperfection of the new method. "It took a little
bit of balance to pull it off while standing on a chair on a desk."

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 breakout of the timid impotence
of his teenage years. Opening up an office to free a terminal wasn't the same
as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in a way 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.

"The snake was a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman's dorm,
not the campus-wide student council. Stallman does re-member the snake
attracting a fair 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."

Stallman and friends also "nominated" the house master's 3-year-old 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 Qin dynasty," he says. (That's the one whose cruel founder burnt
all the books and was buried with the terra cotta warriors.) "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.
ITS allowed anyone to sit down at a console and do anything at all, even order
the system to shut down in five minutes. If someone ordered a shutdown with no
good reason, some other user canceled it. In the mid-1970s some faculty members
(usually those who had formed their attitudes elsewhere) began calling for a
file security system to limit access to their data. Other operating systems had
such features, so those faculty members had become accustomed to living under
security, and to the feeling that it was protecting them from something
dangerous. But the AI Lab, through the insistence of Stallman and other
hackers, remained a security-free zone.
={ Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) +1 }

Stallman presented both ethical and practical arguments against adding
security. On the ethical side, Stallman appealed to the AI Lab community's
traditions of intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he
pointed to the internal structure of ITS, which was built to foster hacking and
cooperation rather than to keep every user under control. Any attempt to
reverse that design would require a major overhaul. To make it even more
difficult, he used up the last empty field in each file's descriptor for a
feature to record which user had most recently changed the file. This feature
left no place to store file security information, but it was so useful that
nobody could seriously propose to remove it.
={ security (computer), opposition to }

"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" (since access control did not stand in your way).~{ See
Richard Stallman (1986). }~

Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines
security-free. In one group at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences,
however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The DM group installed
its first password 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 wrote a program to decrypt the
encrypted passwords that the system recorded. Then he started an email
campaign, asking users to choose the null string as their passwords. If the
user had chosen "starfish," for example, the email message looked something
like this:
={ password-based systems, hacking into +5 }

_1 I see you chose the password "starfish". I suggest that you switch to the
password "carriage return", which is what I use. It's easier to type, and also
opposes the idea of passwords and security.

The users who chose "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, just as all accounts had
been, not long before. That was the point: by refusing to lock the shiny new
locks on their accounts, they ridiculed the idea of having locks. They knew
that the weak security implemented on that machine would not exclude any real
intruders, and that this did not matter, because there was no reason to be
concerned about intruders, and that no one wanted to intrude anyway, only to
visit.

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
null-string password.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],
1984): 417. }~
={ Hackers (Levy) }

Stallman's null-string campaign, and his resistance to security in general,
would ultimately be defeated. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab's machines
were sporting password security systems. Even so, it represented a major
milestone in terms of Stallman's personal and political maturation. Seen in the
context of Stallman's later career, it represents a significant step in the
development of the timid teenager, afraid to speak out even on issues of
life-threatening importance, into 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
key ideas that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for
authority, and frustration over prejudice and secret rules that rendered some
people outcasts. He would also draw on the ethical concepts that would shape
his adult life: responsibility to the community, 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 world view -
incomplete in a few places but, for the most part, fully mature.
={ computer security, opposition to }

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
he 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, responsibility to the community, 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. At the start of his junior year at Harvard, Stallman began
participating in a recreational international folk dance group which had just
been started in Currier House. He was not going to try it, considering himself
incapable of dancing, but a friend pointed out, "You don't know you can't if
you haven't tried." To his amazement, he was good at it and enjoyed it. What
started as an experiment became another passion alongside hacking and studying;
also, occasionally, away to meet women, though it didn't lead to a date during
his college career. While dancing, Stallman no longer felt like the awkward,
un-coordinated 10-year-old whose attempts to play football had ended in
frustration. He felt confident, agile, and alive. In the early 80s, Stallman
went further and joined the MIT Folk Dance Performing Group. Dancing for
audiences, dressed in an imitation of the traditional garb of a Balkan peasant,
he found being in front of an audience fun, and discovered an aptitude for
being on stage which later helped him in public speaking.
={ folk dancing ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     folk dancing
}

Although the dancing and hacking did little to improve Stallman's social
standing, they helped him overcome the sense of exclusion that had clouded his
pre-Harvard life. In 1977, attending a science-fiction convention for the first
time, he came across Nancy the Button maker, who makes calligraphic buttons
saying whatever you wish. 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 start a "second front"
in the ongoing debate on religion. "Back then everybody was arguing about
whether a god existed," Stallman recalls. "'Impeach God' approached the subject
from a completely different viewpoint. If a god was so powerful as to create
the world and yet did nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever
want to worship such a god? Wouldn't it be more just to put it on trial?"

At the same time, "Impeach God" was a reference to the Watergate scandal of the
1970s, in effect comparing a tyrannical deity to Nixon. Watergate affected
Stallman deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up resenting 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 out sized 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 a well-prepared spiel. "My name is
Jehovah," Stallman would say. "I have a secret plan to end injustice and
suffering, but due to heavenly security reasons I can't tell you the workings
of my plan. I see the big picture and you don't, and you know I'm good because
I told you so. So put your faith in me and obey me without question. If you
don't obey, that means you're evil, so I'll put you on my enemies list and
throw you in a pit where the Infernal Revenue Service will audit your taxes
every year for all eternity."

Those who interpreted the spiel as a 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 go after Mr. Big? The way I
see it, any being that has power and abuses it deserves to have that power
taken away."

1~ Chapter 5 - Puddle of Freedom

[RMS: In this chapter, I have corrected statements about facts, including facts
about my thoughts and feelings, and removed some gratuitous hostility in
descriptions of events. I have preserved Williams' statements of his own
impressions, except where noted.]

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."1~{ 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), \\
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/nov/06/andrewbrown. \\ 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 Accidental 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 prophet, 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." }~
={ Wired magazine ;
   Leonard, Andrew ;
   London Guardian ;
   Salon.com
}

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 his personality has a touch or "shadow" of
autism or Asperger's Syndrome, a possibility that Stallman has entertained from
time to time, 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.
={ Asperger Syndrome ;
   autism
}

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.
={ GNU Project :
     GNOME 1.0 +1 ;
   Linux +6 ;
   LinuxWorld +8
}

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?"
={ GNOME 1.0 }

"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."
={ GNU Project :
     Linux and | kernel ;
   Torvalds, Linus +3
}

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.
={ de Icaza, Miguel ;
   GNU/Linux
}

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.~{ See Leander Kahney (1999). }~ 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 manage 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.
={ Red Hat Inc. :
     going public
}

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 his absence from the 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.
={ Redmond (Washington) ;
   Palo Alto (California) ;
   Silicon Valley +1
}

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.
={ Art.net }

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 away 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 mid 1990s, 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 intensely,"
Stallman laments. "Not being able to dance has been a tragedy for me."
={ folk dancing ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     folk dancing
}

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 strokes the
innermost petals against his nose, takes a deep sniff, and steps back with a
contented sigh.

"Mmm, rhinophytophilia," he says, rubbing his back.~{ At the time, I thought
Stallman was referring to the flower's scientific name. Months later, I would
learn that rhino phytophilia was in fact a humorous reference to the activity -
i.e., Stallman's sticking his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment -
presenting it as the kinky practice of nasal sex with plants. For another
humorous Stallman flower incident, \\ visit:
http://www.stallman.org/articles/texas.html. }~

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." (If they are
willing, that is.)
={ Ney, Tim }

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 stop in Hong Kong, 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.
={ GNU Project :
     Linux and ;
   Linux :
     GNU Project and
}

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 c'el'ebre 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 jukebox, 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.
={ Napster +4 ;
   San Mateo (California) +2
}

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 in-junction 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,~{ See Cecily
Barnes and Scott Ard, "Court Grants Stay of Napster Injunction," News.com (July
28, 2000), \\ http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2376465.html. }~ a decision
RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later 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 troublesome 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 [sufficient] 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."
={ Gates, Bill ;
   South Korea
}

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 sequined 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-'a-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, "A
Mae Ling Story" (December 17, 1998), \\
http://crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998-December/001777.html. 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. }~ 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), \\
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/26/free_love/print.html. }~
={ Newitz, Annalee ;
   Salon.com
}

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 GNU kernel after a girl-friend 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 names of operating systems
and kernels - e.g., "Linux." Alix was a Unix system administrator, and had
suggested to her friends, "Someone should name a kernel after me." So Stallman
decided to name the GNU kernel "Alix" as a surprise for her. The kernel's main
developer renamed the kernel "Hurd," but retained the name "Alix" for part of
it. One of Alix's friends noticed this part in a source snapshot and told her,
and she was touched. A later redesign of the Hurd eliminated that part.~{ See
Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement,"
Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. [RMS: Williams
interpreted this vignette as suggesting that I am a hopeless romantic, and that
my efforts were meant to impress some as-yet-unidentified woman. No MIT hacker
would believe this, since we learned quite young that most women wouldn't
notice us, let alone love us, for our programming. We programmed because it was
fascinating. Meanwhile, these events were only possible because I had a
thoroughly identified girlfriend at the time. If I was a romantic, at the time
I was neither a hopeless romantic nor a hopeful romantic, but rather
temporarily a successful one. On the strength of that naive interpretation,
Williams went on to compare meto Don Quijote. For completeness' sake, here's a
somewhat inarticulate quote from the first edition: "I wasn't really trying to
be romantic. 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."] }~
={ HURD kernel ;
   Open Sources (DiBona, et al)
}

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 shu mai?" 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 [being an outcast] did help me [to avoid bowing to popular views],"
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.
={ Beatles +2 ;
   music +4
}

"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."
={ Dylan, Bob ;
   Peter, Paul and Mary
}

When I ask for a definition of "filk," Stallman explains that the term is used
in science fiction fandom to refer to the writing of new lyrics for songs. (In
recent decades, some filkers write melodies too.) 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 filk. As soon as I say
yes, Stallman's voice begins singing in an unexpectedly clear tone, using the
tune of "Blowin' in the Wind":

poem{

    How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,
    f 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, stick it in your ear...

}poem

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 Stallman's
own 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. It also
includes 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, which Stallman considers ethically
unjustifiable. The third category includes works of art and entertainment.
={ copyrighted works, categories of }

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 non-commercially 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."
={ Napster }

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."

Many criticize Stallman for rejecting handy political alliances; some
psychologize this and describe it as a 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 understand-able. 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" comparison at the 1999 LinuxWorld have only reinforced
Stallman's reputation, amongst those who believe virtue consists of following
the crowd, as a disgruntled 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 conduct.
"My only critique is that sometimes Richard treats his friends worse than his
enemies."
={ Young, Robert ;
   Red Hat Inc.
}

[RMS: The term "friends" only partly fits people such as Young, and companies
such as Red Hat. It applies to some of what they did, and do: for instance, Red
Hat contributes to development of free software, including some GNU programs.
But Red Hat does other things that work against the free software movement's
goals - for instance, its versions of GNU/Linux contain non-free software.
Turning from deeds to words, referring to the whole system as "Linux" is
unfriendly treatment of the GNU Project, and promoting "open source" instead of
"free software" rejects our values. I could work with Young and Red Hat when we
were going in the same direction, but that was not often enough to make them
possible allies.]

Stallman's reluctance to ally the free software movement with other political
causes is not due to lack of interest in them. Visit his offices at MIT, and
you instantly find a clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering
civil-rights abuses around the globe. Visit his personal web site,
stallman.org, and you'll find attacks on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
the War on Drugs, and the World Trade Organization. Stallman explains, "We have
to be careful of entering the free software movement into alliances with other
political causes that substantial numbers of free software supporters might not
agree with. For instance, we avoid linking the free software movement with any
political party because we do not want to drive away the supporters and elected
officials of other parties."
={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act ;
   War on Drugs ;
   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 his political voice? [RMS: But I do - when I see a good opportunity.
That's why I started stallman.org. ]

Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates the question for a moment.
[RMS: My quoted response doesn't fit that question. It does fit a different
question, "Why do you focus on free software rather than on the other causes
you believe in?" I suspect the question I was asked was more like that one.]

"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 believe he can
advance the other causes he supports.

"I wish I knew 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 [to oppose it]."

Chewing a final split end, Stallman suggests paying the check. Be-fore 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 did not come from the US Mint.
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, "Untied Status of Avarice." The bill
is for zero dollars,~{ RMS: Williams was mistaken to call this bill
"counterfeit." It is legal tender, worth zero dollars for payment of any debt.
Any U.S. government office will convert it into zero dollars' worth of gold. }~
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.

1~ Chapter 6 - The Emacs Commune
={ Emacs Commune +52 ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     AI Lab, as a programmer +18 ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     Emacs Commune and +52
}

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.
={ Currier House (Harvard University) }

"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 a room in 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:
={ Gosper, Bill ;
   Greenblat, Richard ;
   Sussman, Gerald
}

_1 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. }~
={ computer bums ;
   Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum) ;
   Weizenbaum, Joseph +1
}

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.
={ Feynman, Richard ;
   Gell-Mann, Murray ;
   Harvard University :
     graduation from ;
   Shockley, William
}

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 Club, 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 stop dancing. At
first, Stallman viewed the injury as a temporary problem; he went to dancing
and chatted with friends while listening to the music he loved. 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 expect to be unable to dance, permanently. I was heartbroken."

With no dorm and no dancing, Stallman's social universe imploded. Dancing was
the only situation in which he had found success in meeting women and
occasionally even dating them. No more dancing ever was painful enough, but it
also meant, it seemed, no more dates ever.

"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 and out of physics,
never to return to studies. 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 resumes. *** 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.
={ Thomas Aquinas, saint }

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 a 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 AI Lab faculty member and (since
1985) board member of the Free Software Foundation. Describing Stallman as a
"clear thinker and a clear designer," Sussman invited Stallman to join him in
AI research projects in 1973 and 1975, both aimed at making AI programs that
could analyze circuits the way human engineers do it. The project required an
expert's command of Lisp, a programming language built specifically for AI
applications, as well as understanding (supplied by Sussman) of how a human
might approach the same task. The 1975 project pioneered an AI technique called
dependency-directed backtracking or truth maintenance, which consists of
positing tentative assumptions, noticing if they lead to contradictions, and
reconsidering the pertinent assumptions if that occurs.
={ LISP programming language ;
   Sussman, Gerald
}

When he wasn't working on official projects such as these, 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.
={ TECO editor program +23 }

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.
={ batch processing ;
   Free Software Foundation (FSF) :
     TECO text-editor and ;
   punch cards, for batch processing
}

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.
={ Project MAC ;
   teletype interfaces vs. batch processing +3
}

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 at 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.
={ Engelbart, Doug ;
   graphial interfaces ;
   mice, as video pointers ;
   Stanford Research Institute
}

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.
={ display terminals, replacing teletypes ;
   video screens
}

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.~{ According to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally stood for Tape
Editor and Corrector. \\ See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TECO.html. }~

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
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
string" sequence just to change the text. Over time, a hacker grew proficient
enough to make large changes elegantly in one command string, 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 text and the command string on a split screen. Despite this innovative
hack, editing with TECO still required skill and planning.

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. }~
={ E edit program ;
   Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
}

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. The
only flaws were that it used just five lines of the screen and was too
inefficient for real use. Stallman reimplemented the feature to use the whole
screen efficiently, then extended it in a subtle but significant way. He made
it possible to attach TECO command strings, or "macros," to keystrokes.
Advanced TECO users already saved macros in files; Stallman's hack made it
possible to call them up fast. The result was a user-programmable WYSIWYG
editor. "That was the real breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI Lab
hacker at the time.~{ Ibid. }~
={ macro modes, adding to TECO +11 ;
   Steele, Guy +13
}

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."~{ Ibid. }~

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.~{ Ibid. }~

Two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation began to exhibit
inconvenient side effects. The explosive growth had provided an exciting
validation of the collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to
incompatibility. "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 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 say she 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 natural to reference the
program with a single letter. Once again, the hacker lust for efficiency had
left its mark.~{ Ibid. }~
={ Emacs text editor +11 ;
   GNU Emacs +11
}

Of course, not everyone switched to Emacs, or not immediately. Users were free
to continue maintaining and running their own TECO-based editors as before. But
most found it preferable to switch to Emacs, especially since Emacs was
designed to make it easy to replace or add some parts while using others
unchanged.

"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.

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
called this "joining 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 a 1981 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.
}~
={ Emacs Commune }

The original Emacs ran only on the PDP-10 computer, but soon users of other
computers wanted an Emacs to edit with. The explosive innovation continued
throughout the decade, resulting in a host of Emacs-like programs with varying
degrees of cross-compatibility. The Emacs Commune's rules did not apply to
them, since their code was separate. A few cited their relation to Stallman's
original Emacs with humorously recursive names: Sine (Sine is not Emacs), Eine
(Eine isnot Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially). A true Emacs had to
provide user-programmability like the original; editors with similar keyword
commands but without the user-programmability were called "ersatz Emacs." One
example was Mince (Mince is Not Complete Emacs).
={ Eine (Eine is not Emacs) text editor ;
   Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially) text editor ;
   Sine (Sine is not Emacs) text editor
}

While Stallman was developing Emacs in the AI Lab, there were other, unsettling
developments elsewhere 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 co-creator of the Usenet /{alt}/ hierarchy, 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 declined 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. }~
={ Reid, Brian +1 ;
   Unilogic software company ;
   time bombs, in software ;
   Scribe text-formatting program
}

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 original Emacs, 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," refusing to send lab members
the latest version of Emacs until they rejected the security system on the
lab's computers.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984):
419. }~ This was more gesture than sanction, since nothing could stop them from
installing it themselves. But it got the point across: putting passwords on an
ITS system would lead to condemnation and reaction.
={ security (computer), opposition to ;
   strike, at the Laboratory for Computer Science
}

"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."~{ Ibid. }~

Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The flexibility
Stallman had 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 of GNU Emacs (a second implementation started
in 1984)have modified it 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 Sussman during the 1970sand would later assist Stallman
as a charter board member of the FreeSoftware 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 inter-twined 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. }~
={ Abelson, Hal }

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-triggered feature that reformatted
Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space,
further bolstering the program's WYSIWYG 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.
={ Steele, Guy +3 ;
   Sun Microsystems
}

"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. Asa 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 [that] it was a great experience, very intense,
and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."

1~ Chapter 7 - A Stark Moral Choice
={ Stallman, Richard M. :
     GNU Project +72
}

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:
={ GNU Project :
     new UNIX implementation ;
   net.unix-wizards newsgroup
}

_1 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.~{ See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU Announcement"
(September 1983). }~
={ Unix operating system :
     GNU system and
}

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."~{ Ibid. }~ 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.
={ LISP programming language :
     GNU system and
}

"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?":

_1 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
crash proof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.~{ Ibid. }~

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 written it specifically to run on the powerful
DEC-built PDP-10 computer. When AI Lab administrators elected to phase out the
lab's 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 portability, which made it immune to such dangers.
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, primarily the 16-bit PDP-11 - a machine
considered fit for only small tasks by most AI Lab hackers - but later also
32-bit mainframes such as the VAX 11/780. By 1983, a few companies, most
notably Sun Microsystems, were developing a more powerful generation of desktop
computers, dubbed "workstations," to take advantage of that increasingly
ubiquitous operating system on machines comparable in power to the much older
PDP-10.
={ AT&T ;
   Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) +5 ;
   VAX 11/780 ;
   PDP-10 computer ;
   PDP-11 computer ;
   Sun Microsystems :
     developing workstations
}

To facilitate portability, the developers of Unix had put an extra layer of
abstraction between the software and the machine. Rather than writing it in the
instructions of a specific machine type - as the AI Lab hackers had done with
ITS and the PDP-10 - Unix developers wrote in a high-level language, called C.
Focusing more on the inter-locking interfaces 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
run on any machine. If a user disliked a certain component, the interface
specifications made it possible to pull out an individual subcomponent and
either fix it or replace it with something better. Simply put, the Unix
approach promoted flexibility and economy, hence its rapid adoption.~{ See
Marshall Kirk McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," Open Sources (O'Reilly
& Associates, Inc., 1999): 38. }~
={ abstraction :
     designing Unix ;
   Unix operating system :
     adoption through flexibility
}

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, and the AI Lab hacker community which had sustained it, had been a
traumatic blow to Stallman. If the Xerox laser printer episode had taught him
to recognize the in- justice of proprietary software, the community's death
forced him to choose between surrendering to proprietary software and opposing
it.
={ AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) :
     ITS demise +3
}

Like the software code that composed it, the roots of ITS' demise stretched way
back. By 1980, most of the lab's hackers were working on developing the Lisp
Machine and its operating system.

Created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer John McCarthy, a MIT
artificial-intelligence researcher during the late 1950s, Lisp is an elegant
language, well-suited for writing complex programs to operate on data with
irregular structure. The language's name is a shortened version of LISt
Processing. Following McCarthy's departure to the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the language into a local dialect
dubbed MACLISP. The "MAC" stood for Project MAC, the DARPA-funded research
project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science.
Led by AI Labarch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, the AI Lab hackers during the late
1970s designed a computer specialized for running Lisp efficiently and
conveniently, the Lisp Machine, then developed an entire Lisp-based operating
system for it.

By 1980, two rival groups of hackers had formed two companies to manufacture
and sell copies of the Lisp Machine. Greenblatt started Lisp Machines
Incorporated. He planned to avoid outside investment and make a "hacker
company." Most of the hackers joined Symbolics, a conventional startup. In 1982
they entirely ceased to work at MIT.

With few hackers left to mind the shop, programs and machines took longer to
fix - or were not fixed at all. 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 almost gone while "the professors and the
students who didn't really love the [PDP-10] were just as numerous as
before."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
={ PDP-10 computer +4 }

In 1982, the AI Lab received the replacement for its main computer, the PDP-10,
which was over 12 years old. Digital's current model, the Dec system 20, was
compatible for user programs but would have re-quired 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."~{ Ibid. }~

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 named as a successor to TOPS-10, a proprietary
operating system DEC distributed for the PDP-10. But TOPS-20 was not based on
TOPS-10. It was derived from the Tenex system which Bolt Beranek Newmanhad
developed for the PDP-10.~{ Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview,
Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0 at \\
http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/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 noway I was going to
call it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a 'w' in the Tenex
name and call it Twenex."
={ DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) ;
   TOPS-20 operating system +1 ;
   KL-10 mainframe +11 ;
   Twenex operating systems +4
}

{free_as_in_freedom_2_01_pdp_1_processor_with_kl_10.png 302x203 "PDP-1 processor with KL-10 (a PDP-10 similar to that of the AI Lab), Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1979." }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman

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-11setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard's
bombastic on screen 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. }~
={ Oz +8 ;
   PDP-11 computer
}

If hackers laughed when they first encountered the KL-10, their laughter
quickly died when they encountered Twenex. Not only did Twenex boast built-in
security, but the system's software engineers had designed the tools and
applications with the security system in mind. What once had been a
cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of the Laboratory for Computer
Science's security system, now became an out-and-out battle over system
management. System administrators argued that without security, the Oz system
was more prone to accidental crashes. Hackers argued that crashes could be
better prevented by overhauling the source code. Unfortunately, the number of
hackers with the time and inclination to perform this sort of overhaul had
dwindled to the point that the system-administrator argument prevailed.
={ security (computer), opposition to :
     Twenex operating systems and
}

The initial policy was that any lab member could have the "wheel privilege" to
bypass security restrictions. But anyone who had the "wheel privilege" could
take it away from anyone else, who would then be powerless to restore it. This
state of affairs tempted a small group of hackers to try to seize total control
by canceling the "wheel privilege" for all but themselves.

Cadging passwords, and applying the debugger during startup, Stallman
successfully foiled these attempts. After the second foiled" /{coup d'état}/,"
Stallman issued an alert to all the AI Lab personnel.~{ See Richard Stallman
(1986). }~

"There has been another attempt to seize power," Stallman wrote. "So far, the
aristocratic forces have been defeated." To protect his identity, Stallman
signed the message "Radio Free OZ."

The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's aversion to passwords
and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were
using his account from around the ARPAnet - the research-funded computer
network that would serve as a foundation for today's Internet. One such
"tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who
learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain
access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and
enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.
={ ARPAnet +2 ;
   Hopkins, Don
}

"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their
computers for free," says Hopkins. "It meant a lot to many people."

This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT
management during the ITS years,~{ See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy," \\
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html. }~ fell by the
wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first,
Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so
outside users could have access through his account. Over time, however, Oz's
fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident
or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same
administrators eventually demanded that Stall-man stop publishing his password,
Stallman, citing personal ethics, instead ceased using the Oz system
altogether.~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~

"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my
belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I
don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I
shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime."~{ Ibid. }~

Stallman's refusal to bow before the great and powerful Oz symbolized the
growing tension between hackers and AI Lab management during the early 1980s.
This tension paled in comparison to the conflict that raged within the hacker
community itself. By the time the Dec system 20 arrived, the hacker community
was divided into two camps, LMI and Symbolics.
={ Symbolics +15 ;
   LISP programming language +1
}

Symbolics, with its outside investment, recruited various AI Lab hackers and
set some of them working on improving parts of the Lisp Machine operating
system outside the auspices of the AI Lab. By the end of 1980, the company had
hired 14 AI Lab staffers as part-time consultants to develop its version of the
Lisp Machine. The remaining few, apart from Stallman, worked for LMI.~{ See
Steve Levy, Hackers, page 423. }~ Stallman, preferring the unpressured life at
the AI Lab and not wishing to take a side, chose to join neither company.
={ AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) :
     Symbolics and +10
}

At first, the other hackers continued spending some of their time at MIT, and
contributed to MIT's Lisp Machine operating system. Both LMI and Symbolics had
licensed this code from MIT. The license required them to return their changes
to MIT, but did not require them to let MIT redistribute these changes.
However, through 1981 they adhered to a gentleman's agreement to permit that,
so all their system improvements were included in the MIT version and thus
shared with all Lisp Machine users. This situation allowed those still at MIT
to remain neutral.

On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well because it was his birthday,
Symbolics executives ended the gentleman's agreement. The motive was to attack
LMI. LMI had fewer hackers, and fewer staff in general, so the Symbolics
executives thought that LMI was getting the main benefit of sharing the system
improvements. By ending the sharing of system code, they hoped to wipe out LMI.
So they decided to enforce the letter of the license. Instead of contributing
their improvements to the MIT version of the system, which LMI could use, they
provided MIT with a copy of the Symbolics version of the system for users at
MIT to run. Anyone using it would provide the service of testing only to
Symbolics, and if he made improvements, most likely they too would only be
useful for Symbolics.

As the person responsible (with help from Greenblatt for the first couple of
months) for keeping up the lab's Lisp Machine system, Stallman was incensed.
The Symbolics hackers had left the system code with hundreds of half-made
changes that caused errors. Viewing this announcement as an "ultimatum," he
retaliated by disconnecting Symbolics' microwave communications link to the
laboratory. He then vowed never to work on a Symbolics machine, and pledged to
continue the development of MIT's system so as to defend LMI from Symbolics.
"The way I saw it, the AI Lab was a neutral country, like Belgium in World War
II," Stallman says. "If Germany invades Belgium, Belgium declares war on
Germany and sides with Britain and France."
={ DARPA;
   Greenblat, Richard;
   LISP programming language:
     operating system for+4;
   MACLISP language;
   McCarthy, John;
   Project MAC;
   Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
}

When Symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still
appearing in the MIT Lisp Machine system and, by extension, the LMI Lisp
machine, they were not pleased. Stallman knew what copyright law required, and
was rewriting the features from scratch.He took advantage of the opportunity to
read the source code Symbolics supplied to MIT, so as to understand the
problems and fixes, and then made sure to write his changes in a totally
different way. But the Symbolics executives didn't believe this. They installed
a "spy" program on Stallman's computer terminal looking for evidence against
him. However, when they took their case to MIT administration, around the start
of 1983, they had little evidence to present: a dozen places in the sources
where both versions had been changed and appeared similar.
={ Brain Makers :
     Genius, Ego, and Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think, The Newquist ;
   Newquist, Harvey
}

When the AI Lab administrators showed Stallman Symbolics' supposed evidence, he
refuted it, showing that the similarities were actually held over from before
the fork. Then he turned the logic around:if, after the thousands of lines he
had written, Symbolics could produce no better evidence than this, it
demonstrated that Stallman's diligent efforts to avoid copying were effective.
The AI Lab approved Stallman's work, which he continued till the end of 1983.~{
The Brain Makers by H. P. Newquist says inaccurately that the AI Lab told
Stallman to stay away from the Lisp Machine project. }~

Stallman did make a change in his practices, though. "Just to be ultra safe, I
no longer read their source code [for new features and major changes]. I used
only the documentation and wrote the code from that." For the biggest new
features, rather than wait for Symbolics to release documentation, he designed
them on his own; later, when the Symbolics documentation appeared, he added
compatibility with Symbolics' interface for the feature. Then he read
Symbolics' source code changes to find minor bugs they had fixed, and fixed
each of them differently.

The experience solidified Stallman's resolve. As Stallman designed replacements
for Symbolics' new features, he also enlisted members of the AI Lab to keep
using the MIT system, so as to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. MIT
continued giving LMI direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish
Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says. Such statements are
revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman's non pacifist nature, they
also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict.

The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the "destruction" of
his "home" - i.e., the demise of the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In
a later email interview with Levy, Stall-man would liken himself to the
historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a Pacific
Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The
analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost mythical, terms.~{ Steven
Levy in Hackers had this period in mind when he described Stallman as the "last
of the true hackers," but his intended meaning was not what you might think.
Levy used the term "true hackers" to distinguish the MIT hacker community from
two other hacker communities described later in the book, to which he gave
other names. When this community had dissolved, leaving only Stallman, he
therefore became the last of the "true hackers." Levy did not mean that nobody
else was truly a hacker, but people tend to interpret his words that way,
especially those who see them without reading the explanations in Levy's book.
Stallman has never described himself using those words of Levy's. }~ The
hackers who worked for Symbolics saw it differently. Instead of seeing
Symbolics as an ex-terminating force, many of Stallman's colleagues saw it as a
belated bid for relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company
pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the
ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate market place where
manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing Stallman as a
holdout, many hackers saw him as the representative of an obsolete practice.
={ Ishi ;
   Yahi
}

Personal hostilities also affected the situation. Even before Symbolics hired
away most of the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who
later joined Symbolics were shunning him. "I was no longer getting invited to
go to Chinatown," Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was that
if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at
the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting
asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that
he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without
me a secret."
={ Greenblat, Richard }

Although Stallman felt hurt by this petty form of ostracism, there was nothing
to be done about it. The Symbolics ultimatum changed the matter from a personal
rejection to a broader injustice. When Symbolics excluded its source changes
from redistribution, as a means to defeat its rival, Stallman determined to
thwart Symbolics' goal. By holing up in his MIT offices and writing equivalents
for each new software feature and fix, he gave users of the MIT system,
including LMI customers, access to the same features as Symbolics users.

It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community.
Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the
output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers - a team that included more
than a few legendary hackers itself - still stands as one of the major human
accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing
it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer
code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had
no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy
quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the
company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during
this period:
={ Gosper, Bill }

_1 I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably
not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But
wait a minute - Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over
there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!"~{ See
Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 426 }~

For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a mixture
of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had
served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In many ways, the Symbolics
war offered the rite of passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever
since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the same time, however, it
coincided with the traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had
nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day, while taking a break from
writing code, Stallman experienced a traumatic moment passing through the lab's
equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the hulking, unused frame of the
PDP-10 machine. Startled by the dormant lights, lights that once actively
blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the internal program,
Stallman says the emotional impact was not unlike coming across a beloved
family member's well-preserved corpse.
={ PDP-10 computer }

"I started crying right there in the machine room," he says. "Seeing the
machine there, dead, with nobody left to fix it, it all drove home how
completely my community had been destroyed."

Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The Lisp Ma-chine, despite all
the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into making it, was merely
a sideshow to the large battles in the technology marketplace. The relentless
pace of computer miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful
microprocessors that would soon incorporate the machine's hardware and software
capabilities like a modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.

Riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds - thousands- of proprietary
software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and
nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for hackers to review or share
source code. The licenses were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had
become strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away would-be interlopers.
Software, once a form of garnish most hardware companies gave away to make
their expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main
dish. In their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting
aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal.

Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal
computer systems. Companies such as Apple Computer and Commodore were minting
fresh millionaires selling machines with built-in operating systems. Unaware of
the hacker culture and its distaste for binary-only software, many of these
users saw little need to protest when these companies failed to attach the
accompanying source-code files. A few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic
helped propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the
marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new programs and
savvy enough to write End User License Agreements to lock them up tight.
={ Apple Computers ;
   Commodore computers ;
   software +10
}

One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill Gates, a Harvard
dropout two years Stallman's junior. Although Stallman didn't know it at the
time, seven years before sending out his message to the net.unix-wizards
newsgroup, Gates, a budding entrepreneur and general partner with the
Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later spelled as Microsoft, had
sent out his own open letter to the software-developer community. Written in
response to the PC users copying Micro-Soft's software programs, Gates' "Open
Letter to Hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software
development.
={ Gates, Bill +2 ;
   Micro-Soft ;
   net.unix-wizards newsgroup ;
   Open Letter to Hobbyists (Gates) +1
}

"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" asked Gates. "What
hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs,
documenting his product, and distributing it for free?"~{ See Bill Gates, "An
Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976). To view an online copy of this
letter, \\ go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists. }~

Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive, Gates' 1976 letter
nevertheless represented the changing attitude toward software both among
commercial software companies and commercial software developers. Why treat
software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said otherwise? As the 1970s
gave way to the 1980s, selling software became more than a way to recoup costs;
it became a political statement. At a time when the Reagan Administration was
rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that
had been built up during the half century following the Great Depression, more
than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by
extension, un-American. At best, it was a throwback to the anti-corporate
attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street banker
discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between French-cuffed shirts and
double-breasted suits, many computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an
embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age.

For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as a throwback to the 1950s, Stallman
didn't mind living out of step with his peers. As a programmer used to working
with the best machines and the best software, however, Stallman faced what he
could only describe as a "stark moral choice": either swallow his ethical
objection for "proprietary" software - the term Stallman and his fellow hackers
used to describe any program that carried copyright terms or an end-user
license that restricted copying and modification - or dedicate his life to
building an alternate, non-proprietary system of software programs. After his
two-year battle with Symbolics, Stallman felt confident enough to undertake the
latter option. "I suppose I could have stopped working
={ proprietary software +3 }

on computers altogether," Stallman says. "I had no special skills, but I'm sure
I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant, probably, but I
could've been a waiter somewhere."

Being a waiter - i.e., dropping out of programming altogether -would have meant
completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had given him so
much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to Cambridge, Stallman
finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when software programming provided
the only pleasure. Rather than drop out, Stallman decided to stick it out.

An Atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, karma, or a divine calling
in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary
software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural
one. After all, it was Stallman's own personal combination of stubbornness,
foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to consider a fork in the road
most others didn't know existed. In his article, "The GNU Project," Stallman
affirms agreement with the ideals encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage
Hillel:
={ Hillel +1 ;
   Open Sources (DiBona, et al) +1
}

% ### group --> ? compare earlier version

_1 If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am
I? If not now, when?~{ See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html.
Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an Atheist, I
don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one
of them has said. }~

Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and ex-presses the
decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system
developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question
for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was
needed to solve the problem."

Once he recognized that, Stallman says, everything else "fell into place." In
1983, MIT was acquiring second-generation Lisp Machines from Symbolics, on
which the MIT Lisp Machine system could not possibly run. Once most of the MIT
machines were replaced, he would be unable to continue maintaining that system
effectively for lack of users' bug reports. He would have to stop. But he also
wanted to stop. The MIT Lisp Machine system was not free software: even though
users could get the source code, they could not redistribute it freely.
Meanwhile, the goal of continuing the MIT system had already been achieved: LMI
had survived and was developing software on its own.

Stallman didn't want to spend his whole life punishing those who had destroyed
his old community. He wanted to build a new one. He decided to denounce
software that would require him to compromise his ethical beliefs, and devote
his life to the creation of programs that would make it easier for him and
others to escape from it. Pledging to build a free software operating system
"or die trying - of old age, of course," Stallman quips, he resigned from the
MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU.

The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of MIT.
Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to continue
using the facilities, and later his own office. He also had the ability to
secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU
Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about
conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose
early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into
the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that
environment.
={ GNU Project }

For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix
community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had
attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade
in its early stages.
={ net.unix-wizards newsgroup }

"The community reaction was pretty much uniform," recalls Rich Morin, leader of
a Unix user group at the time. "People said, 'Oh, that's a great idea. Show us
your code. Show us it can be done.'"

Aware that the job was enormous, Stallman decided to try to reuse existing free
software wherever possible. So he began looking for existing free programs and
tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of the first
candidates was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written in the
popular C programming language into machine-runnable code. Translated from the
Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free University Compiler Kit.
Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. When
the author informed him that the words "Free University" were a reference to
the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and that the program was not free,
Stallman was chagrined.

"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler
was not," recalls Stallman. He had not only refused to help - he suggested
Stallman drop his plan to develop GNU, and instead write some add-ons to boost
sales of VUCK, in return for a share of the profits. "I therefore decided that
my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform
compiler." 19~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free
Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. }~

Instead of VUCK, Stallman found the Pastel compiler ("off-color Pascal"),
written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to what
they said when they gave him a copy, the compiler was free to copy and modify.
Unfortunately, the program was unsuitable for the job, because its memory
requirements were enormous. It parsed the entire input file in core memory,
then retained all the internal data until it finished compiling the file. On
mainframe systems this design had been forgivable. On Unix systems it was a
crippling barrier, since even 32-bit machines that ran Unix were often unable
to provide so much memory to a program. Stallman made substantial progress at
first, building a C-compatible front end to the compiler and testing it on the
larger Vax, whose system could handle large memory spaces. When he tried
porting the system to the 68010, and investigated why it crashed, he discovered
the memory size problem, and concluded he would have to build a totally new
compiler from scratch. Stallman eventually did this, producing the GNU C
Compiler or GCC. But it was not clear in 1984 what to do about the compiler, so
he decided to let those plans gel while turning his attention to other parts of
GNU.
={ C programming language :
     VUCK compiler for ;
   VUCK compiler
}

In September of 1984, thus, Stallman began development of a GNU version of
Emacs, the replacement for the program he had been supervising for a decade.
Within the Unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist
(and Unix co-creator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but neither
offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs.
={ Bell Labs ;
   Emacs text editor :
     rewriting for Unix +2 ;
   GNU Emacs :
     rewriting for Unix +2 ;
   Joy, Bill ;
   vi text editor ;
   Thompson, Ken
}

Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "I
wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop one."

Once again, Stallman had found existing code with which he hoped to save time.
In writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon following the footsteps
of Carnegie Mellon graduate student James Gosling, author of a C-based version
dubbed Gosling Emacs or Gosmacs. Gosling's version of Emacs included an
interpreter for a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language, called Mocklisp.
Although Gosling had put Gosmacs under copyright and had sold the rights to
UniPress, a privately held software company, Stallman received the assurances
of a fellow developer who had participated in early Gosmacs development.
According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon,
had given him permission by email to distribute his own version of Gosmacs in
exchange for his contribution to the code.
={ Carnegie Mellon University ;
   Gosling, James +3 ;
   GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) ;
   interpreters for LISP +1 ;
   LISP programming language :
     EMACS and +1 ;
   MOCKLISP language ;
   UniPress software company +1
}

At first Stallman thought he would change only the user-level commands, to
implement full compatibility with the original PDP-10Emacs. However, when he
found how weak Mocklisp was in comparison with real Lisp, he felt compelled to
replace it with a true Lisp system. This made it natural to rewrite most of the
higher-level code of Gosmacs in a completely different way, taking advantage of
the greater power and flexible data structures of Lisp. By mid-1985, in GNU
Emacs as released on the Internet, only a few files still had code remaining
from Gosmacs.

Then UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, and denied that the other
developer had received permission to distribute his own version of Gosmacs. He
could not find a copy of the old email to defend his claim. Stallman eliminated
this problem by writing replacements for the few modules that remained from
Gosmacs.

Nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights - indeed,
the very notion of developers having such powers to sell in the first place -
rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute,
Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the dangers
associated with proprietary software.
={ proprietary software :
     Emacs and +4 ;
   Swedish Royal Technical Institute
}

"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life
is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and
start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret
any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for
me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but
everyone is too cowardly to even take it."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~

Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's code would assist
both Stallman and the free software movement in the longterm. It would force
Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust
system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force
Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives.
Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued /{The GNU
Manifesto}/, an expansion of the original announcement posted in September,
1983. Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the
many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the
proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't
programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response
encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:
={ Emacs Commune :
     proprietary software and ;
   Emacs text editor ;
   GNU Emacs ;
   GNU Manifesto
}

"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote.
"Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [ sic ] as society
is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating
innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they
restrict the use of these programs."~{ See Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto
(1985), \\ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html. }~

With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It
also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix
developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for
tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project,
Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software
Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU
Project towards its goal. With Stallman as president and various friends and
hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the
GNU Project.
={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) :
     GNU Project and ;
   GNU Project :
     Emacs, release of
}

Robert Chassell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc., became one
of five charter board members at the Free Software Foundation following a
dinner conversation with Stallman. Chassell also served as the organization's
treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew.
={ Chassell, Robert +6 ;
   LISP Machines Inc. (LMI) ;
   LMI (LISP Machines Inc.)
}

"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were something in the order of
$23,000, give or take," Chassell recalls. "Richard had his office, and we
borrowed space. I put all the stuff, especially the tapes, under my desk. It
wasn't until sometime later LMI loaned us some space where we could store tapes
and things of that sort."

In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided a center
of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market that had seemed
so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU announcement was
becoming increasingly competitive. In an attempt to tighten their hold on
customers, companies were starting to deny users access to Unix source code, a
trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software
projects.

The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning
to see him as a software prophet or a software Cassandra, according as they
felt hope or despair over escaping the problem she identified.

"A lot of people don't realize, until they've had it happen to them, how
frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software program only
to have it taken away," says Chassell, summarizing the feelings and opinions of
the correspondents writing in to the FSF during the early years. "After that
happens a couple of times, you start to say to yourself, 'Hey, wait a minute.'"

For Chassell, the decision to participate in the Free Software Foundation came
down to his own personal feelings of loss. Prior to LMI, Chassell had been
working for hire, writing an introductory book on Unix for Cadmus, Inc., a
Cambridge-area software company. When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the
book down with it, Chassell says he attempted to buy the rights back with no
success.

"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on a shelf somewhere, unusable,
uncopyable, just taken out of the system," Chassell says. "It was quite a good
introduction if I may say so myself. It would have taken maybe three or four
months to convert [the book] into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux
today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in my memory, was lost."

Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile employer
struggled through bankruptcy, Chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that
drove Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity, for me, was the sense
that if you want to have a decent life, you don't want to have bits of it
closed off," Chassell says. "This whole idea of having the freedom to go in and
to fix something and modify it, whatever it may be, it really makes a
difference. It makes one think happily that after you've lived a few years that
what you've done is worthwhile. Because otherwise it just gets taken away and
thrown out or abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation
to it. It's like losing a bit of your life."

1~ Chapter 8 - St. Ignucius
={ Ignucius, (St.) ;
   St. Ignucius
}

The Maui High Performance Computing Center is located in a single-story
building in the dusty red hills just above the town of Kihei. Framed by
million-dollar views and the multi-million dollar real estate of the
Silversword Golf Course, the center seems like the ultimate scientific
boondoggle. Far from the boxy, sterile confines of Tech Square or even the
sprawling research metropolises of Argonne, Illinois and Los Alamos, New
Mexico, the MHPCC seems like the kind of place where scientists spend more time
on their tans than their post-doctoral research projects.
={ Argonne (Illinois) ;
   Los Alamos (New Mexico) ;
   Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) ;
   MHPCC (Maui High Performance Computing Center)
}

The image is only half true. Although researchers at the MHPCC do take
advantage of the local recreational opportunities, they also take their work
seriously. According to { Top500.org }http://top500.org, a web site that tracks
the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBMSP Power3 supercomputer
housed within the MHPCC clocks in at 837 billion floating-point operations per
second, making it one of 25most powerful computers in the world. Co-owned and
operated by the University of Hawaii and the U.S. Air Force, the machine
divides its computer cycles between the number crunching tasks associated with
military logistics and high-temperature physics research.
={ IBM SP Power3 supercomputer ;
   U.S Air Force ;
   University of Hawaii ;
   Top500.org
}

Simply put, the MHPCC is a unique place, a place where the brainy culture of
science and engineering and the laid-back culture of the Hawaiian islands
coexist in peaceful equilibrium. A slogan on the lab's 2000 web site sums it
up: "Computing in paradise."

It's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find Richard Stallman, a man
who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby Maui Channel through the
picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters a terse critique: "Too much
sun." Still, as an emissary from one computing paradise to another, Stallman
has a message to deliver, even if it means subjecting his hacker eyes to
painful solar glare.

The conference room is already full by the time I arrive to catch Stallman's
speech. The gender breakdown is a little better than at the New York speech,
85% male, 15% female, but not by much. About half of the audience members wear
khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone
native. Dressed in the gaudy flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of
the world, their faces area deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication
of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO
laptops.

Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain
blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore
thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the
unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin.~{ RMS: The idea that skin can be
"sun-starved" or that paleness is "unhealthy"is dangerous misinformation;
staying out of the sun can't hurt you as long as you have enough Vitamin D.
What damages the skin, and can even kill you, is excessive exposure to
sunlight. }~ His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even
the coolest Hawaiian neck. Short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on
his forehead, Stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried. [RMS: Is there
something bad about looking different from others?]

As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members
wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to
set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the
Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix,
is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the
hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of
the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local
free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow
programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest
pearls of RMS wisdom.
={ Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) ;
   BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) ;
   Grateful Dead, The +1 ;
   Maui FreeBSD Users Group
}

The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business
opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the
Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record
live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the
center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that
tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record
contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live
appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead
drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.~{ See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule:
1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses," \\ http://www.dead101.com/1197.htm. }~

While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal
aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of
the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code
might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies
such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the
letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing
the GPL as the information-technology industry's /{Magna Carta}/, ZDNet
software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things
GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back
control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the /{Magna Carta}/ gave
rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on
behalf of the users of computer software."~{ See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid
of Big Bad Wolves," /{ZDNet}/ Tech Update (December 15, 2000), \\
http://www.zdnet.com/news/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/298394. }~
={ Hewlett Packard ;
   IBM ;
   Sun Microsystems
}

The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why 40-odd
programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the
Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear
Stallman speak.

Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also offers no
self-introduction. When the FreeBSD people finally get their equipment up and
running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over
every other voice in the room.
={ FreeBSD }

"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society
should have for using software, the people considering it are from software
companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective,"
says Stallman, opening his speech. "What rules can we impose on everybody else
so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be
part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I
always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what
kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are
in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers."

Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser
printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures
to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux name.

"Some people say to me, 'Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this
system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get
recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the
job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the
users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything
with computers in freedom."~{ For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go
in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The
GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components: \\ _* The freedom to
run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). \\ _* The freedom to
study the program's source code, and change it so that the program does what
you wish (freedom 1). \\ _* The freedom to redistribute copies of the program
so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). \\ _* The freedom to distribute
copies of your modified versions, so that the whole community can benefit from
them (freedom 3). For more information, please visit "The Free Software
Definition" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. }~

Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do."

For some in the audience, this is old material. For others, it's a little
arcane. When a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing off, Stallman
stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up.

"Somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if I was some kind of
healer," says Stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd. "I guess that
probably means I can help you drift gently into a blissful, relaxing sleep. And
some of you might need that. I guess I shouldn't object if you do. If you need
to sleep, by all means do."

The speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing issue of
concern both within the software industry and within the free software
community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the awkward nature of
applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to the frictionless
universe of information technology.

Copyright law and patent law work differently, and have totally different
effects in the software field. The copyright on a program controls the copying
and adaptation of that program's code, and it belongs to the program's
developer. But copyright does not cover ideas. In other words, a developer is
free, under copyright, to implement in his own code features and commands he
has seen in existing programs. Those aspects are ideas, not expression, and
thus outside the scope of copyright law.

It is likewise lawful - though hard work - to decode how a binary program
works, and then implement the same ideas and algorithms indifferent code. This
practice is known as "reverse engineering."

Software patents work differently. According to the U.S. Patent Office,
companies and individuals can obtain patents for computing ideas that are
innovative (or, at least, unknown to the Patent Office). In theory, this allows
the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of the technique for a specific
monopoly lasting a minimum of 20 years after the patent filing. In practice,
the disclosure is of limited value to the public, since the operation of the
program is often self-evident, and could in any case be determined by reverse
engineering. Unlike copyright, a patent gives its holder the power to forbid
the independent development of software programs which use the patented idea.
={ U.S. Patent Office }

In the software industry, where 20 years can cover the entire life cycle of a
marketplace, patents take on a strategic weight. Where companies such as
Microsoft and Apple once battled over copyright and the "look and feel" of
various technologies, today's Internet companies use patents as a way to stake
out individual applications and business models, the most notorious example
being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to patent the company's "one-click" on line
shopping process. For most companies, however, software patents have become a
defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate
patents against another in a tense form of corporate detente. Still, in a few
notable cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software
vendors have successfully stifled rival developments. For instance, some
font-rendering features are missing from free soft-ware because of patent
threats from Apple.

For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker
vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the political
benefits of free software programs over the competitive benefits. Stallman says
competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating
systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over
their proprietary counterparts, are side issues compared to the large issues of
user and developer freedom.
={ FreeBSD +2 }

This position is controversial within the community: open source advocates
emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political
advantages. Rather than stress the political significance of free software
programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity
of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open
source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built,
better inspected and, by extension, more trustworthy to the average user.

That's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political
implications. For open source advocates, the term open source serves two
purposes. First, it eliminates the confusion associated with the word "free," a
word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost." Second, it allows
companies to examine the free software phenomenon on a technological, rather
than ethical, basis. Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative and
one of the leading hackers to endorse the term, explained his refusal to follow
Stallman's political path in a 1999 essay, titled "Shut Up and Show Them the
Code":
={ OSI (Open Source Initiative) ;
   Open Source Initiative (OSI) ;
   Raymond, Eric ;
   Shut Up and Show Them the Code (Raymond) +1
}

_1 RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are. We hackers
are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals to "principle" and
"freedom" and "rights." Even when we disagree with bits of his program, we want
RMS's rhetorical style to work; we think it ought to work; we tend to be
puzzled and disbelieving when it fails on the 95% of people who aren't wired
like we are.~{ See Eric Raymond, "Shut Up and Show Them the Code," online
essay, (June28, 1999), \\
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html. }~

Included among that 95%, Raymond writes, are the bulk of business managers,
investors, and non-hacker computer users who, through sheer weight of numbers,
tend to decide the overall direction of the commercial software marketplace.
Without a way to win these people over, Raymond argues, programmers are doomed
to pursue their ideology on the periphery of society:

_1 When RMS insists that we talk about "computer users' rights," he's issuing a
dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old failures. It's one we
should reject - not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of
language, applied to software, simply does not persuade anybody but us. In
fact, it confuses and repels most people outside our culture.~{ Ibid. }~

Stallman, however, rejects Raymond's premises:

_1 Raymond's attempt to explain our failure is misleading because we have not
failed. Our goal is large, and we have a long way to go, but we have also come
a long way.

_1 Raymond's pessimistic assertion about the values of non-hackers is an
exaggeration. Many non-hackers are more concerned with the political issues we
focus on than with the technical advantages that open source emphasizes. This
often includes political leaders too, though not in all countries.

_1 It was the ethical ideals of free software, not "better software," which
persuaded the presidents of Ecuador and Brazil to move government agencies to
free software. They are not geeks, but they understand freedom.

But the principal flaw in the open source argument, according to Stallman, is
that it leads to weaker conclusions. It convinces many users to run some
programs which are free, but does not offer the many reason to migrate entirely
to free software. This partially gives them freedom, but does not teach them to
recognize it and value it as such, so they remain likely to let it drop and
lose it. For instance, what happens when the improvement of free software is
blocked by a patent?

Most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman
when it comes to opposing software patents. So too are most proprietary
software developers, since patents threaten their projects too. However,
pointing to software patents' tendency to put areas of software functionality
off limits, Stallman contrasts what the free software idea and the open source
idea imply about such cases.

"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says
Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us
from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these
gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source
movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful
reliable software, they're likely to say, 'You didn't deliver what you
promised. This software's not more powerful. It's missing this feature. You
lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement,
that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, 'How dare those
people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind
of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents
explode."

Watching Stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard to see
anything confusing or repellent. Stallman's appearance may seem off-putting,
but his message is logical. When an audience member asks if, in shunning
proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with
the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms
of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere
technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free
program rather than a more advanced non free program, because I won't give up
my freedom for something like that [advance]. My rule is, if I can't share it
with you, I won't take it."

In the minds of those who assume ethics means religion, such answers reinforce
the quasi-religious nature of the Stallman message. However, unlike a Jew
keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman is not obeying a
commandment, but simply refusing to cede his freedom. His speech explains the
practical requisites for doing so: a proprietary program takes away your
freedom, so if you want freedom, you need to reject the program.

Stallman paints his decision to use free software in place of proprietary in
the color of a personal belief he hopes others will come to share. As software
evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats.
Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman speech not knowing where the
true path to software righteousness lies.

As if to drive home this message, Stallman punctuates his speech with an
unusual ritual. Pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag, Stallman
puts it on. Then he pulls out a reflective brown computer disk and places it on
his head. The crowd lets out a startled laugh.

"I am St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs," says Stallman, raising his right
hand in mock-blessing. "I bless your computer, my child."
={ Ignucius, (St.) ;
   St. Ignucius
}

The laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. As audience
members clap, the computer disk on Stallman's head catches the glare of an
overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. In the blink of an eye,
Stallman resembles a Russian religious icon.

{free_as_in_freedom_2_02_rms_st_ignucius.png 254x240 "Stallman dressed as St. IGNUcius. The photo was taken by Stian Eikeland in Bergen, Norway on February 19, 2009." }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman

"Emacs was initially a text editor," says Stallman, explaining the getup.
"Eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for some. We call
this religion the Church of Emacs."
={ Church of Emacs +8 ;
   Emacs text editor +11 ;
   GNU Emacs +11
}

The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-parody, a humorous return-jab at the
many people who might see Stallman's form of software asceticism as religious
fanaticism in disguise. It is also the sound of the other shoe dropping -
loudly. It's as if, in donning his robe and halo, Stallman is finally letting
listeners off the hook, saying, "It's OK to laugh. I know I'm weird." [RMS: To
laugh at someone for being weird is boorish, and it is not my intention to
excuse that. But I hope people will laugh at my St. IGNUcius comedy routine.]

Discussing the St. IGNUcius persona afterward, Stallman says he first came up
with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well before the emergence
of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that
precipitated it. At the time, Stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at
himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the
fanatic some made him out to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others
seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software
ideologue, as Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the Linux.com web
site:
={ linux.com ;
   Raymond, Eric :
     St. Ignucius and +2
}

_1 When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing him
of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a
theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious - have you ever seen him in his St.
IGNUcius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? Mostly it's
unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works,
that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.~{ See "Guest
Interview: Eric S. Raymond," /{Linux.com}/ (May 18, 1999), \\
http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/. }~

Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of making
fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as anything more than
that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine."

That said, Stallman does admit to being a ham. "Are you kidding?" he says at
one point. "I love being the center of attention." To facilitate that process,
Stallman says he once enrolled in Toastmasters, an organization that helps
members bolster their public-speaking skills and one Stallman recommends highly
to others. He possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most
theatrical performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. A few
days after the Maui High Performance Computing Center speech, I allude to the
1999 LinuxWorld performance and ask Stallman if he has a Groucho Marx complex -
i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would have him as a
member.~{ RMS: Williams misinterprets Groucho's famous remark by treating it as
psychological. It was intended as a jab at the overt antisemitism of many
clubs, which was why they would refuse him as a member. I did not understand
this either until my mother explained it to me. Williams and I grew up when
bigotry had gone underground, and there was no need to veil criticism of
bigotry in humor as Groucho did. }~ Stallman's response is immediate: "No, but
I admire Groucho Marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some things I
say inspired by him. But then I've also been inspired in some ways by Harpo."
={ Marx, Groucho +1 }

The Groucho Marx influence is certainly evident in Stallman's lifelong fondness
for punning. Then again, punning and wordplay are common hacker traits. Perhaps
the most Groucho-like aspect of Stallman's personality, however, is the deadpan
manner in which the puns are delivered. Most come so stealthily - without even
the hint of a raised eyebrow or upturned smile - you almost have to wonder if
Stal-man's laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him.

Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center laugh at the St.
IGNUcius parody, such concerns evaporate. While not exactly a standup act,
Stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful of engineers in
stitches. "To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does not require celibacy, but
it does require making a commitment to living a life of moral purity," he tells
the Maui audience. "You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems
from all your computers, and then install a wholly [holy] free operating
system. And then you must install only free software on top of that. If you
make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the Church
of Emacs, and you too may have a halo."

The St. IGNUcius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix systems and
Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to Emacs is vi,
pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley
student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy. Before doffing
his "halo," Stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "People sometimes ask me
if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi," he says. "Using a free
version of vi is not a sin;it is a penance. So happy hacking."~{ The service of
the Church of Emacs has developed further since 2001. Users can now join the
Church by reciting the Confession of the Faith: "There is no system but GNU,
and Linux is one of its kernels." Stallman sometimes mentions the religious
ceremony known as the Foobar Mitzvah, the Great Schism between various rival
versions of Emacs, and the cult of the Virgin of Emacs (which refers to any
person that has not yet learned to use Emacs). In addition, "vi vi vi" has been
identified as the Editor of the Beast. }~
={ Joy, Bill ;
   vi text editor :
     as an Emacs competitor ;
   UC Berkeley ;
   Sun Microsystems
}

After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather around
Stallman. A few ask for autographs. "I'll sign this," says Stallman, holding up
one woman's print out of the GNU General Public License, "but only if you
promise me to use the term GNU/Linux instead of Linux" (when referring to the
system), "and tell all your friends to do likewise."
={ GNU General Public License ;
   GPL
}

The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other stage
performers and political figures, Stallman has no "off" mode. Aside from the
St. IGNUcius character, the ideologue you see on stage is the ideologue you
meet backstage. Later that evening, during a dinner conversation in which a
programmer mentions his affinity for "open source" programs, Stallman, between
bites, upbraids his table-mate: "You mean free software. That's the proper way
to refer to it."

During the question-and-answer session, Stallman admits to playing the
pedagogue at times. "There are many people who say, 'Well, first let's invite
people to join the community, and then let's teach them about freedom.' And
that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is almost everybody's
inviting people to join the community, and hardly anybody's teaching them about
freedom once they come in."

The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city. "You have
millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on
step two: getting them out of those shantytowns. If you think talking about
software freedom is a good strategy, please join in doing step two. There are
plenty working on step one. We need more people working on step two."

Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not
acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who hope to
reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's
errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays. "Unless you're
working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized."

Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent.
"Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?"

"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really," says
Stallman.

"But I mean if someone wants to steal another company's piece of software."

Stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "Wait a second," Stallman
says. "Steal? I'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that statement that the
only thing I can say is that I reject that prejudice." Then he turns to the
substance of the question. "Companies that develop non-free software and other
things keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to
change. In the old days -even in the 1980s - for the most part programmers were
not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to
them. What happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if
they were not in the free software movement, they kept secret the little
details. And now they patent those broad ideas and keep secret the little
details. So as far as what you're describing, patents really make no difference
to it one way or another."

"But if it doesn't affect their publication," a new audience member jumps in,
his voice trailing off almost as soon as he starts speaking.

"But it does," Stallman says. "Their publication is telling you that this is an
idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for 20 years. And what the
hell good is that? Besides, they've written it in such a hard way to read, both
to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it's
basically useless looking at the published information [in the patent] to learn
anything anyway. The only reason to look at patents is to see the bad news of
what you can't do."

The audience falls silent. The speech, which began at 3:15, is now nearing the
5:00 whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in their seats, antsy to
get a jump start on the weekend. Sensing the fatigue, Stallman glances around
the room and hastily shuts things down. "So it looks like we're done," he says,
following the observation with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush
out any last-minute questioners. When nobody throws their hand up, Stallman
signs off with a traditional exit line.

"Happy hacking," he says.

1~ Chapter 9 - The GNU General Public License
={ GNU General Public License +82 ;
   GPL +82 ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     childhood | GNU General Public License +82
}

By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had produced the GNU Project's first
useful result - a Lisp-based version of Emacs for Unix-like operating systems.
To make it available to others as free software, he had to develop the way to
release it - in effect, the follow-on for the Emacs Commune.
={ Emacs Commune +7 ;
   Emacs text editor :
     Lisp-based free software version ;
   GNU Emacs :
     List-based free software version
}

The tension between the freedom to modify and authorial privilege had been
building before Gosmacs. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S.
copyright law, extending the legal coverage of copyright to software programs.
According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies could
copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes
or methods embodied in the program."~{ See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and
Joanne Costello, "Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1997), \\
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html.
}~
={ Copyright Act of 1976 ;
   copyright laws ;
   GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) ;
   software :
     copyright laws on
}

Translated, this treated a program much like an algebra textbook:its author can
claim copyright on the text but not on the mathematical ideas of algebra or the
pedagogical technique employed to explain it. Thus, regardless of what Stallman
said about using the code of the original Emacs, other programmers were legally
entitled to write their own implementations of the ideas and commands of Emacs,
and they did. Gosmacs was one of 30-odd imitations of the original Emacs
developed for various computer systems.

The Emacs Commune applied only to the code of the original Emacs program
written by Stallman himself. Even if it had been legally enforced, it would not
have applied to separately developed imitations such as Gosmacs. Making Gosmacs
non-free was unethical according to the ethical ideas of the free software
movement, because(as proprietary software) it did not respect its users'
freedom, but this issue had nothing to do with where the ideas in Gosmacs came
from.

Under copyright, programmers who wanted to copy code from an existing program
(even with changes) had to obtain permission from the original developer. The
new law applied copyright even in the absence of copyright notices - though
hackers generally did not know this - and the copyright notices too began
appearing.

Stallman saw these notices as the flags of an invading, occupying army. Rare
was the program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet,
with a single stroke of the president's pen, the U.S. government had given
programmers and companies the legal power to forbid such reuse. Copyright also
injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system.
Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now to be
settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the
automatic advantage. Some saw placing one's name in a copyright notice as
taking responsibility for the quality of the code, but the copyright notice
usually has a company's name, and there are other ways for individuals to say
what code they wrote.
={ source code :
     copy rights for
}

However, Stallman also noticed, in the years leading up to the GNU Project,
that copyright allowed an author to grant permission for certain activities
covered by copyright, and place conditions on them too. "I had seen email
messages with copyright notices plus simple 'verbatim copying permitted'
licenses," he recalls. "Those definitely were [an] inspiration." These licenses
carried the condition not to remove the license. Stallman's idea was to take
this a few steps further. For example, a permission notice could allow users to
redistribute even modified versions, with the condition that these versions
carry the same permission.

Thus Stallman concluded that use of copyright was not necessarily unethical.
What was bad about software copyright was the way it was typically used, and
designed to be used: to deny the user essential freedoms. Most authors imagined
no other way to use it. But copyright could be used in a different way: to make
a program free and assure its continued freedom.

By GNU Emacs 16, in early 1985, Stallman drafted a copyright-based license that
gave users the right to make and distribute copies. It also gave users the
right to make and distribute modified versions, but only under the same
license. They could not exercise the unlimited power of copyright over those
modified versions, so they could not make their versions proprietary as Gosmacs
was. And they had to make the source code available. Those conditions closed
the legal gap that would otherwise allow restricted, non-free versions of GNU
Emacs to emerge.
={ Emacs text editor :
     copyrights and | GNU Emacs License and ;
   GNU Emacs :
     copyrights and | GNU Emacs License and ;
   GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) :
     copyrights and ;
   licenses +15
}

Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune, the
early GNU Emacs license remained too "informal" for its purpose, Stallman says.
Soon after forming the Free Software Foundation he began working on a more
airtight version, consulting with the other directors and with the attorneys
who had helped to set it up.

Mark Fischer, a Boston copyright attorney who initially provided Stallman's
legal advice, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period.
"Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says, "He had
two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely as open as
possible." (By the time he said this, Fischer seems to have been influenced by
open source supporters; Stallman never sought to make software "open.") "The
second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices." The
requirements in the license were designed for the second goal.
={ Fischer, Mark +2 }

The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in.
At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs license as a simple
trade. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use. Instead of money, Stallman was
charging users access to their own later modifications. That said, Fischer does
remember the license terms as unique.

"I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly
unusual at that time," he says.

In fashioning the GNU Emacs license, Stallman made one major change to the
informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that
Commune members send him all the changes they wrote, Stallman now demanded only
that they pass along source code and freedom whenever they chose to
redistribute the program. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs
for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to
Stallman. In a rare alteration of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the
"price tag" for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking
over their shoulders, and distribute their versions only when they wished, just
so long as all copies came with permission for their possessors to develop and
redistribute them further.

Stallman says this change was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big
Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract. As much as he had
found it useful for everyone to send him their changes, he came to feel that
requiring this was unjust. "It was wrong to require people to publish all
changes," says Stallman.

"It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind
of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in
which all had equal rights."

The GNU Emacs General Public License made its debut on a version of GNU Emacs
in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker
community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the
offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant
to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs
over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing
so, Gilmore had published the changed version under the GNU Emacs license.
Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and
concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up until then, most licenses were very
informal," Gilmore recalls.
={ Gilmore, John +6 ;
   SunOS :
     porting Emacs to ;
   Sun Microsystems
}

As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites the mid-1980s copyright
license of trn, a news reader program written by Larry Wall, a hacker who could
go onto later fame as the creator of both the Unix "patch" utility and the Perl
scripting language. In the hope of striking a balance between common hacker
courtesy and an author's right to dictate the means of commercial publication,
Wall used the program's accompanying copyright notice as an editorial sounding
board.
={ Wall, Larry +1 ;
   patches, inserting into source code ;
   Perl programming language ;
   source code :
    patches
}

_1 Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall \\ You may copy the trn kit in whole or in
part as long as you don't try to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote
it.~{ See Trn Kit README, \\
http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/trn/src/trn-3.6/README. }~

Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the
difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the
rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs license, Stallman
had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary
offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both
lawyer and hacker alike.

It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to
"port" the GNU Emacs license over to their own programs. Prompted by a
conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986,
suggesting modification:

_1 You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with
"SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of
the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.~{ See John Gilmore,
quoted from email to author. }~

Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end
of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next major milestone,
the source-code debugger GDB. To release this, he had to modify the GNU Emacs
license so it applied to GDB instead of GNU Emacs. It was not a big job, but it
was an opening for possible errors. In 1989, Stallman figured out how to remove
the specific references to Emacs, and express the connection between the
program code and the license solely in the program's source files. This way,
any developer could apply the license to his program without changing the
license. The GNU General Public License, GNU GPL for short, was born. The GNU
Project soon made it the official license of all existing GNU programs.
={ GNU Debugger (GDB) +1 ;
   GDB (GNU Debugger) ;
   Debugger +1
}

In publishing the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using
decimal numbers to indicate versions with minor changes and whole numbers to
indicate versions with major changes. The first version, in 1989, was labeled
Version 1.0. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political
intentions:

_1 The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the
freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source
code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use
pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to
deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions
translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the
software, or if you modify it.~{ See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General
Public License: Version 1,"(February, 1989), \\
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html. }~

As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a system of
communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law.
More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal
code and software code. Implicit within the GPL's preamble was a profound
message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view
it as a dangerous system that could be hacked.
% ={Emacs Commune+1}

"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community
discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation,
needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance,"
says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who advised Stallman after Fischer departed.
"The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from
widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance."

In a 1986 interview with /{BYTE}/ magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in
colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said,
readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual ju-jitsu, using the legal
system that software hoarders have set up against them."~{ See David Betz and
Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [ sic ]
Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1986).
(Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: \\
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html .) \\ This interview offers an
interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes
during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the
evolution of Stallman's rhetoric. \\ Describing the purpose of the GPL,
Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and
information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control
whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from
sharing it, is sabotage." \\ Contrast this with a statement to the author in
August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your
thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term
generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so
different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about
them at once. If you hear somebody saying something' about intellectual
property,' without [putting it in] quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly
and you shouldn't join." \\ [RMS: The contrast it shows is that I've learned to
be more cautious in generalizing. I probably wouldn't talk about "owning
knowledge" today, since it's a very broad concept. But "owning knowledge" is
not the same generalization as "intellectual property," and the difference
between those three laws is crucial to understanding any legal issue about
owning knowledge. Patents are direct monopolies over using specific knowledge;
that really is one form of "owning knowledge." Copyrights are one of the
methods used to stop the sharing of works that embody or explain knowledge,
which is a very different thing. Meanwhile, trademarks have very little to do
with the subject of knowledge.] }~ Years later, Stallman would describe the
GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in
a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had
to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In
spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I
wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do
this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been
designed for anything like this."
={ Byte magazine }

About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues
associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him
a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow
science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As
a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of
stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in
particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed."
Stallman, inspired by the sticker, nicknamed the legal technique employed in
the GNU Emacs license (and later in the GNU GPL) "Copyleft," jocularly
symbolized by a backwards "C" in a circle. Over time, the nickname would become
general Free Software Foundation terminology for any copyright license "making
a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the
program to be free software as well."
={ copyleft ;
   Hopkins, Don
}

The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are
built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. Every
successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the
original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more
easily translatable across cultures and time.
={ Weber, Max }

While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting
example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized
world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies
who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have
willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. Thousands have also accepted
the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs.
Even those who reject the GPL conditions as too limiting still credit it as
influential.

One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of
California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department,
the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix
development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of
Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern
Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the
Unix software, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the
Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed
by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.
={ AT&T +1 ;
   Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) +6 ;
   Bostic, Keith +5 ;
   BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) +6 ;
   Computer Systems Research Group ;
   University of California +4 ;
   TCP/IP
}

The code written by Bostic and friends was off limits to nearly everyone,
because it was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. Berkeley distributions
were therefore available only to institutions that already had a Unix source
license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had
at first seemed innocuous (to those who thought only of academia) became
increasingly burdensome even there. To use Berkeley's code in GNU, Stallman
would have to convince Berkeley to separate it from AT&T's code and release it
as free software. In 1984 or 1985 he met with the leaders of the BSD effort,
pointing out that AT&T was not a charity and that for a university to donate
its work (in effect) to AT&T was not proper. He asked them to separate out
their code and release it as free software.
={ licenses :
     AT&T UNIX source code and +2
}

Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting the latest
version of BSD to the PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says,
that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional
forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with
Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go
to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner."
={ PDP-11 computer }

The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have
preferred. In June, 1989, Berkeley had separated its networking code from the
rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and began distributing it under a
copyright-based free license. The license terms were liberal. All a licensee
had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting
derivative programs.~{ The University of California's "obnoxious advertising
clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a permissive alternative
to the GPL, some hackers used the original BSD license, replacing "University
of California" with their own names or the names of their institutions. The
result: free software systems using many of these programs would have to cite
dozens of names in advertisements. In 1999, after a few years of lobbying on
Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause. See
"The BSD License Problem" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. }~ In
contrast to the GPL, this license permitted proprietary offshoots. One problem
limited the use of the BSD Networking release: it wasn't a complete operating
system, just the network-related parts of one. While the code would be a major
contribution to any free operating system, it could only be run at that time in
conjunction with other, proprietary-licensed code.
={ AT&T +1 }

Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees
worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely
redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from
Unix Systems Laboratories - the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the
Unix code - the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before
then, however, many of the Berkeley network utilities would make their way into
Stallman's GNU system.

"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we
did without the GNU influence," says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly
something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea."

By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect
on the free software community. A program didn't have to carry the GPL to
qualify as free software - witness the case of the BSD network utilities - but
putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very
existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making
free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of
Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian
GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens
says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of
Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens
recalls.
={ Perens, Bruce }

Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement
with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began
to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of
Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes
containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated
calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were
copyrighted or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around
1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically
fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the
word GPL, I knew I was home free,"recalls Morin.
={ SunOS }

To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes
to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now,
with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put
together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a
commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time
Freeware.
={ Sun User Group }

Such commercial exploitation was completely consistent with the free software
agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had
refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think
free as in free speech."

For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few
entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom
associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial
equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was
free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world.

One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a
software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the
1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician
following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler,
or GCC, in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free
software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell," Tiemann says the program's own existence
underlined Stallman's determination as a programmer.
={ C Compiler (GNU) +9 ;
   GNU C Compiler (GCC) +9 ;
   GCC (GNU C Compiler) +9 ;
   Tiemann, Michael +8 ;
   Stanford University
}

"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every
programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American compiler,"
Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very humbling."

"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it," echoes Bostic. "Nobody
had a compiler back then, until GCC came along."

Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of his work.
The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann
recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. So easy in fact that
Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the
software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip.
Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating
the first "native" or direct compiler for the C++ programming language, by
extending GCC to handle C++ as well as C. (The existing, proprietary
implementation of the C++ language worked by converting the code to the C
language, then feeding the result to a C compiler.) One day, while delivering a
lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers
struggling to pull off the same thing.
={ C+ programming language }

"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many people were
working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the
information was confidential but added that if I took a look around the room I
might get a good general idea."

It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his head.
"I had been working on that project for six months," Tiemann says. I just
thought to myself, whether it's me or the code, this is a level of efficiency
that the free market should be ready to reward."

Tiemann found added inspiration in the /{GNU Manifesto}/: while excoriating the
greed of proprietary software vendors, it also encourages companies, as long as
they respect users freedom, to use and redistribute free software in their
commercial activities. By removing the power of monopoly from the commercial
software question, the GPL makes it possible for even small companies to
compete on the basis of service, which extends from simple tech support to
training to extending free programs for specific clients' needs.
={ GNU Manifesto }

In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's /{Manifesto}/. "It
read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business
plan in disguise."~{ See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An
Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139,
\\ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html. }~

This business plan was not new; Stallman supported himself in the late 80s by
doing this on a small scale. But Tiemann intended to take it to a new level.
Teaming up with John Gilmore and David Vinayak Wallace, Tiemann launched a
software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed
Cygnus Support (informally, "Cygnus" was a recursive acronym for "Cygnus, Your
GNU Support"), the company signed its first development contract in February,
1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and
development contracts.
={ Gilmore, John }

The complete GNU operating system Stallman envisioned required more than
software development tools. In the 1990s, GNU also developed a command line
interpreter or "shell," which was an extended replacement for the Bourne Shell
(written by FSF employee Brian Fox, and christened by Stallman the Bourne Again
Shell, or BASH), as well as the PostScript interpreter Ghostscript, the
documentation browser platform Texinfo, the C Library which C programs need in
order to run and talk to the system's kernel, the spreadsheet Oleo ("better for
you than the more expensive spreadsheet"), and even a fairly good chess game.
However, programmers were typically most interested in the GNU programming
tools.

GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but
they weren't the only ones developed by the GNU Project in the 80s. By 1990,
GNU had also generated GNU versions of the build-controller Make, the
parser-generator YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk); as
well as dozens more. Like GCC, GNU programs were usually designed to run on
multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making
programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more
useful as well.

Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to
a useless but vitally important software package called GNU Hello, which serves
as an example to show programmers how to properly package a program for GNU.
"It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it
were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and
the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the
GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different
environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not
only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project
software."

According to Stallman, improving technically on the components of Unix was
secondary to replacing them with free software. "With each piece I may or may
not find a way to improve it," said Stallman to /{BYTE}/. "To some extent I am
getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better.
To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on
many other systems. I therefore have many ideas [which I learned from them] to
bring to bear."~{ See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986). }~
={ Byte magazine }

Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI
Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout
the entire software-development community.

Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run
his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation
with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the
program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of
source code only to have it rejected by Stallman.
={ Allison, Jeramy +1 }

"It was like the /{Onion}/ headline," Allison says. "'Child's prayers to God
answered: No.'"
={ Onion, The }

As the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of user-level
programs and libraries, it postponed development of the kernel, the central
"traffic cop" program that controls other programs' access to the processor and
all machine resources.

As with several other major system components, Stallman sought a head-start on
kernel development by looking for an existing program to adapt. A review of GNU
Project "GNUs letters" of the late 1980s reveals that this approach, like the
initial attempt to build GCC out of Pastel, had its problems. A January, 1987
GNUs letter reported the GNU Project's intention to overhaul TRIX, a kernel
developed at MIT. However, Stallman never actually tried to do this, since he
was working on GCC at the time; later he concluded that TRIX would require too
much change to be a good starting point. By February of 1988, according to a
newsletter published that month, the GNU Project had shifted its kernel plans
to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. Mach was
not then free software, but its developers privately said they would liberate
it; when this occurred, in 1990, GNU Project kernel development could really
commence.~{ See "Hurd History," \\
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html. }~

The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on
Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit
against rival software companies, Paperback Software International and Borland,
for copying menu commands from Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus'
suit, coupled with the Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, endangered the
future of the GNU system. Although neither suit directly attacked the GNU
Project, both threatened the right to develop software compatible with existing
programs, as many GNU programs were. These lawsuits could impose a chilling
effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do
something, Stallman and a few professors put an ad in /{The Tech}/ (the MIT
student newspaper) blasting the lawsuits and calling for a boycott of both
Lotus and Apple. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to
protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League for
Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc.
={ Apple Computers ;
   Lotus Development Corp. ;
   Microsoft Corporation :
     Apple Computer lawsuit ;
   Paperback Software International
}

The protests were notable.~{ According to a League for Programming Freedom
press release at \\
http://progfree.org/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release, the protests were
no-table for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: \\ 1-2-3-4, toss
the lawyers out the door \\ 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate \\ 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3
is not for me \\ D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go }~

They document the evolving nature of the software industry. Applications had
quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In
its unfinished quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project
seemed hopelessly behind the times to those whose primary values were fashion
and success. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put
together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel"
lawsuits led some observers to think that the FSF was obsolete.

However, Stallman had a strategic reason to start a separate organization to
fight the imposition of new monopolies on software development: so that
proprietary software developers would join it too. Extending copyright to cover
interfaces would threaten many proprietary software developers as well as many
free software developers. These proprietary developers were unlikely to endorse
the Free Soft-ware Foundation, but there was, intentionally, nothing in the
League for Programming Freedom to drive them away. For the same reason,
Stallman handed over leadership of LPF to others as soon as it was feasible.

In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation certified Stallman's
genius status when it granted Stallman a Mac Arthur fellowship, the so-called
"genius grant," amounting in this case to$240,000 over 5 years. Although the
Foundation does not state a reason for its grants, this one was seen as an
award for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software
philosophy. The grant relieved a number of short-term concerns for Stallman.
For instance, it enabled him to cease the consulting work through which he had
obtained his income in the 80s and devote more time to the free software cause.

The award also made it possible for Stallman to register normally to vote. In
1985 a fire in the house where Stallman lived left him without an official
domicile. It also covered most of his books with ash, and cleaning these "dirty
books" did not yield satisfying results. From that time he lived as a
"squatter" at 545 Technology Square, and had to vote as a "homeless person."~{
See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT, The Tech
(July 18, 1990), \\ http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html. }~ "[The
Cambridge Election Commission] didn't want to accept that as my address,"
Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article about the MacArthur grant
said that, and then they let me register."~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard
Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified
Genius" (1999). }~

Most importantly, the MacArthur fellowship gave Stallman press attention and
speaking invitations, which he used to spread the word about GNU, free
software, and dangers such as "look and feel" lawsuits and software patents.

Interestingly, the GNU system's completion would stem from one of these trips.
In April 1991, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki,
Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, who was
just beginning to develop the Linux kernel - the free software kernel destined
to fill the GNU system's main remaining gap.
={ Helsinki, Finland +3 ;
   Polytechnic University (Finland) ;
   Torvalds, Linus +16
}

A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded
Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the
stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001
autobiography /{Just for Fun}/. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."~{ See
Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental
Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59. Although
presumably accurate in regard to Torvalds' life, what the book says about
Stallman is sometimes wrong. For instance, it says that Stallman "wants to make
everything open source," and that he "complains about other people not using
the GPL." In fact, Stallman advocates free software, not open source. He urges
authors to choose the GNU GPL, in most circumstances, but says that all free
software licenses are ethical. }~

While not exactly attuned to the "socio political" side of the Stallman agenda,
Torvalds nevertheless appreciated one aspect of the agenda's underlying logic:
no programmer writes error-free code. Even when users have no wish to adapt a
program to their specific preferences, any program can use improvement. By
sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual
motivations such as greed or ego protection.

Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not on
mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley assortment of home-built
computer systems. As a university student, Torvalds had made the step up from
PC programming to Unix, using the university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like
progression had given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to
machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and
privilege. For Torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh
Helsinki winter. Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just to log
in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from
the warm confines of his off-campus apartment.
={ IBM 7094 computer ;
   MicroVAX +1
}

Torvalds was using Minix, a lightweight non-free system developed as an
instructional example by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ It was
non-free in 1991. Minix is free software now. }~ It included the non-free Free
University Compiler Kit, plus utilities of the sort that Tanenbaum had
contemptuously invited Stallman in 1983 to write.~{ Tanenbaum describes Minix
as an "operating system" in his book, Operating System Design and
Implementation , but what the book discusses is only the part of the system
that corresponds to the kernel of Unix. There are two customary usages of the
term "operating system," and one of them is what is called the "kernel" in Unix
terminology. But that's not the only terminological complication in the
subject. That part of Minix consists of a microkernel plus servers that run on
it, a design of the same kind as the GNU Hurd plus Mach. The microkernel plus
servers are comparable to the kernel of Unix. But when that book says "the
kernel," it refers to the microkernel only. See Andrew Tanenbaum, Operating
System Design and Implementation , 1987. }~
={ Minix operating system +2 ;
   Unix operating system :
   Minix and ;
   Tanenbaum, Andrew
}

Minix fit within the memory confines of Torvalds' 386 PC, but it was intended
more to be studied than used. The Minix system also lacked the facility of
terminal emulation, which would mimic a typical display terminal and thus
enable Torvalds to log in to the MicroVAX from home.

Early in 1991, Torvalds began writing a terminal emulation program. He used
Minix to develop his emulator, but the emulator didn't run on Minix; it was a
stand-alone program. Then he gave it features to access disk files in Minix's
file system. Around then, Torvalds referred to his evolving work as the
"GNU/Emacs of terminal emulation programs."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David
Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins
Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78. }~

Since Minix lacked many important features. Torvalds began extending his
terminal emulator into a kernel comparable to that of Minix, except that it was
monolithic. Feeling ambitious, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for copies of the
POSIX standards, the specifications for a Unix-compatible kernel.~{ POSIX was
subsequently extended to include specifications for many command-line features,
but that did not exist in 1991. }~ A few weeks later, having put his kernel
together with some GNU programs and adapted them to work with it, Torvalds was
posting a message reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting:

_1 Hello everybody out there using minix-

_1 I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since
April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people
like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of
the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently
ported bash (1.08) and gcc(1.40)...~{ Ibid, p. 85. }~

The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds had
posted a 0.01 version of his kernel - i.e., the earliest possible version fit
for outside review - on an Internet FTP site. In the course of doing so,
Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new kernel. On his own PC hard
drive, Torvalds had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its respects
to the software convention of giving each Unix variant a name that ended with
the letter X. Deeming the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax,
only to have the FTP site manager change it back.
={ Freax }

Torvalds said he was writing a free operating system, and his comparing it with
GNU shows he meant a complete system. However, what he actually wrote was a
kernel, pure and simple. Torvalds had no need to write more than the kernel
because, as he knew, the other needed components were already available, thanks
to the developers of GNU and other free software projects. Since the GNU
Project wanted to use them all in the GNU system, it had perforce made them
work together. While Torvalds continued developing the kernel, he (and later
his collaborators) made those programs work with it too.

Initially, Linux was not free software: the license it carried did not qualify
as free, because it did not allow commercial distribution. Torvalds was worried
that some company would swoop in and take Linux away from him. However, as the
growing GNU/Linux combination gained popularity, Torvalds saw that sale of
copies would be useful for the community, and began to feel less worried about
a possible takeover.~{ Ibid, p. 94-95. }~ This led him to reconsider the
licensing of Linux.

Neither compiling Linux with GCC nor running GCC with Linux required him
legally to release Linux under the GNU GPL, but Torvalds' use of GCC implied
for him a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would
later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."~{ Ibid, p.
95-97. }~ Not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when
other people looked to him for similar support. A decade after the decision,
Torvalds echoes the Free Software Foundation's Robert Chassell when he sums up
his thoughts at the time:
={ C Compiler (GNU) :
     Linux development and +3 ;
   GNU C Compiler (GCC) :
     Linux development and ;
   GCC (GNU C Compiler) :
   Linux development and}
}

_1 You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it
available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want people to
take advantage of it. I wanted people to be able to see [Linux], and to make
changes and improvements to their hearts' content. But I also wanted to make
sure that what I got out of it was to see what they were doing. I wanted to
always have access to the sources so that if they made improvements, I could
make those improvements myself.~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just
For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers,
Inc., 2001): 94-95. }~

When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to operate
fully with GCC, Torvalds decided to throw his lot in with the free software
movement. He discarded the old license of Linux and replaced it with the GPL.
Within three years, Linux developers were offering release 1.0 of Linux, the
kernel; it worked smoothly with the almost complete GNU system, composed of
programs from the GNU Project and elsewhere. In effect, they had completed the
GNU operating system by adding Linux to it. The resulting system was basically
GNU plus Linux. Torvalds and friends, however, referred to it confusingly as
"Linux."

By 1994, the amalgamated system had earned enough respect in the hacker world
to make some observers from the business world wonder if Torvalds hadn't given
away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the
first issue of /{Linux Journal}/, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds
for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at
giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even
with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very
best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.~{ See
Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March
1, 1994), \\ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2736. }~
={ Young, Robert }

That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to Stallman and
the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing portability. Although
it would take a couple of years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness
of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however,
the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R
but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The
motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical
specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free
software.
={ Control-R (^R) }

As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would
take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything more than a holdover
until the GNU developers delivered on the Hurd kernel. As far as Torvalds was
concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and
reassembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway
success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days
on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for
having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain. "I may not
have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman's 1991
Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL.
"But I guess something from his speech sunk in."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David
Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins
Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59. }~
={ HURD kernel }

1~ Chapter 10 - GNU/Linux
={ GNU/Linux +45 ;
   Linux +45 ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     GNU Linux +46
}

By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the optimistically
inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker culture. /{Wired}/
magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, Usenet,
and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang
term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into
mainstream lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer,
once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole
new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the
GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free GNU operating
system, users could already run the GNU/Linux variant.
={ Internet +3 ;
   Wired magazine ;
   PCs (personal computers) +2 ;
   personal computers (PCs) +2
}

Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a decade of
struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in
mainstream society. People were getting it.

Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried
its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was
cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was
saying nice things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own
domain name, white-house.gov, *** but it was also meeting with the companies,
censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the
Internet's Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in
commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation
in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user
won over to the free software cause via GNU/Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands,
were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time. GNU/Linux had only
rudimentary graphical interfaces, so it was hardly user-friendly. In 1993, only
an expert could use it. The GNU Project's first attempt to develop a graphical
desktop had been abortive.
={ Intel }

Then there was the political situation. Copyrighting of user interfaces was
still a real threat - the courts had not yet rejected the idea. Meanwhile,
patents on software algorithms and features were a growing danger that
threatened to spread to other countries.

Finally, there was the curious nature of GNU/Linux itself. Unrestricted by
legal disputes (such as BSD faced), GNU/Linux's high-speed evolution had been
so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the
software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album
than unified project, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits:
everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C
Library) toX (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory
for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley
Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet
domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. In addition, it contained
the Linux kernel - itself designed as a replacement for Minix. Rather than
developing a new operating system, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux
development team had plugged their work into this matrix. As Torvalds himself
would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm
basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people
actually do."~{ Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To
date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond
essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997), \\
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. }~
={ BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon) ;
   Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND) ;
   C programming language :
     glibc ;
   GNU Debugger (GDB) :
     Linux and ;
   GDB (GNU Debugger) :
     Linux and ;
   glibc (GNU C Library) ;
   GNU C Library (glibc) ;
   kernel (Linux) ;
   X graphic user interface ;
   Laboratory for Computer Science :
     X, developing ;
   Minix operating system :
     kernel, used for Linux ;
   TCP/IP ;
   Torvalds, Linus :
     Minix, reworking for Linux +2
}

Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling
from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an
ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds
hadn't built his kernel out of a desire to give his fellow hackers freedom;
he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. So what exactly was
the combined system, and which philosophy would people associate it with? Was
it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by
Stallman in the /{GNU Manifesto}/? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty
software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own
home system?
={ GNU Manifesto }

By late 1993, a growing number of GNU/Linux users had begun to lean toward the
latter definition and began brewing private variations on the theme. They began
to develop various "distributions" of GNU/Linux and distribute them, sometimes
gratis, sometimes for a price. The results were spotty at best.

"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions,"
remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue University.
"You'd flip through Unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads
proclaiming 'Linux.' Most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that
saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own [proprietary] source code
into the mix."
={ Murdock, Ian +38 ;
   Red Hat Inc. ;
   Purdue University
}

Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by GNU/Linux when he
first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. "It was just a lot of
fun," he says. "It made me want to get involved." The explosion of poorly built
distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the
best way to get involved was to build a version free of additives, Murdock set
about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the
intention of folding them into his own distribution. "I wanted something that
would live up to the Linux name," Murdock says.

In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on the
Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first
responding email messages was from rms@ai.mit.edu. As a hacker, Murdock
instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the
GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers."
Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would
Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about
Murdock's gripes over "Linux" distributions?

Murdock opened the message.

"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and
that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux [sic] system, too.
Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their
philosophy."
={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) :
     Linux and +3
}

Not to over dramatize, the message represented a change in strategy on
Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of
Linux affairs. After first hearing of the new kernel, Stallman asked a friend
to check its suitability. Recalls Stallman, "Here ported back that the software
was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also
told me it wasn't portable."
={ System V }

The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was
firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to
report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only free
kernel in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next year
and a half listening to progress reports from the Hurd developer, reporting
rather slow progress, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later
uproot and replant Linux and GNU onto new platforms.

By 1993, the GNU Project's failure to deliver a working kernel was leading to
problems both within the GNU Project and in the free software movement at
large. A March, 1993, /{Wired}/ magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described
the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many
tools.~{ See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" /{Wired}/ (March, 1993).
}~ Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software
Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let
on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of
opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that
window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact
exactly what happened."~{ Chassell's concern about there being a 36-month
"window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During
the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution
were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of
BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD
and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of
performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a
fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. To view a sample analysis of
the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating
systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux
Successful" (1999), \\ http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. }~
={ Garfinkel, Simson ;
   GNU Project :
     kernel ;
   Wired magazine :
     GNU Project and
}

Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the 1990-1993
period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those struggles, Eric
Raymond, an old friend of Stallman's who supported the GNU Project lukewarmly,
says the problem was largely institutional. "The FSF got arrogant," Raymond
says. "They moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating
system to doing operating-system research." Even worse, "They thought nothing
outside the FSF could affect them."
={ HURD kernel +4 ;
   Raymond, Eric
}

Murdock adopts a more charitable view. "I think part of the problem is they
were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he says.
"Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were a hot topic. Unfortunately,
that was about the time that the GNU Project started to design their kernel.
They ended up with a lot of baggage and it would have taken a lot of
backpedaling to lose it."

Stallman responds, "Although the emotions Raymond cites come from his
imagination, he's right about one cause of the Hurd's delay:the Hurd developer
several times redesigned and rewrote large parts of the code based on what he
had learned, rather than trying to make the Hurd run as soon as possible. It
was good design practice, but it wasn't the right practice for our goal: to get
something working ASAP."

Stallman cites other issues that also caused delay. The Lotus and Apple
lawsuits claimed much of his attention; this, coupled with hand problems that
prevented him from typing for three years, mostly excluded Stallman from
programming. Stallman also cites poor communication between various portions of
the GNU Project. "We had to do a lot of work to get the debugging environment
to work," he recalls." And the people maintaining GDB at the time were not that
cooperative." They had given priority to supporting the existing platforms of
GDB's current users, rather than to the overall goal of a complete GNU system.

Most fundamentally, however, Stallman says he and the Hurd developers
underestimated the difficulty of developing the Unix kernel facilities on top
of the Mach microkernel. "I figured, OK, the [Mach]part that has to talk to the
machine has already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the Hurd team's
troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to get it
done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous
multi-threaded programs was really hard. There were timing bugs that would
clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result was that it took many,
many years to produce a test version."~{ See Maui High Performance Computing
Center Speech. In subsequent emails, I asked Stallman what exactly he meant by
the term "timing bugs." Stallman said "timing errors" was a better way to
summarize the problem and offered an elucidating technical information of how a
timing error can hamper an operating system's performance: \\ "Timing errors"
occur in an asynchronous system where jobs done in parallel can theoretically
occur in any order, and one particular order leads to problems. \\ Imagine that
program A does X, and program B does Y, where both X and Y are short routines
that examine and update the same data structure. Nearly always the computer
will do X before Y, or do Y before X, and then there will be no problem. On
rare occasions, by chance, the scheduler will let program A run until it is in
the middle of X, and then run B which will do Y. Thus, Y will be done while Xis
half-done. Since they are updating the same data structure, they will
interfere. For instance, perhaps X has already examined the data structure, and
it won't notice that there was a change. There will be an unreproducible
failure, unreproducible because it depends on chance factors (when the
scheduler decides to run which program and how long). \\ The way to prevent
such a failure is to use a lock to make sure X and Y can't run at the same
time. Programmers writing asynchronous systems know about the general need for
locks, but sometimes they overlook the need for a lock in a specific place or
on a specific data structure. Then the program has a timing error. }~

Over time, the growing success of GNU together with Linux made it clear that
the GNU Project should get on the train that was leaving and not wait for the
Hurd. Besides, there were weaknesses in the community surrounding GNU/Linux.
Sure, Linux had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted,
the desire to treat GNU/Linux as a purely free software operating system was
far from unanimous. By late 1993, the total GNU/Linux user population had grown
from a dozen or so enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.~{
GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've
provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat
"Milestones" site, \\ http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html. }~
What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation, and
some developers had no objection to exploiting it with non-free software. Like
Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an
understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the
GNU/Linux "victory."~{ I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman
himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill: \\ World War II and
the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing
up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones,
we will fight them on the beaches... we will never surrender," have always
resonated for me. }~

Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the FSF
announced that it would lend its money and moral support to Murdock's software
project, other offers of support began rolling in. Murdock dubbed the new
project Debian - a compression of his and his wife, Deborah's, names - and
within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[Richard's support]
catapulted Debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to
something people within the community had to pay attention to," Murdock says.
={ Debian +19 }

In January of 1994, Murdock issued the /{Debian Manifesto}/. Written in the
spirit of Stallman's /{GNU Manifesto}/ from a decade before, it explained the
importance of working closely with the Free Software Foundation. Murdock wrote:
={ Debian Manifesto +3 ;
   Free Software Foundation (FSF) :
     Debian Manifesto and ;
   GNU Manifesto :
     Debian Manifesto and
}

_1 The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the future
of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing it, a message is
sent to the world that Linux [sic] is not a commercial product and that it
never should be, but that this does not mean that Linux will never be able to
compete commercially. For those of you who disagree, I challenge you to
rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial software
but which have had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of that
fact.

_1 The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux[sic] rather than on
the destructive goal of enriching one-self at the expense of the entire Linux
community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be
the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the /{Manifesto}/, but I
hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow
them to be solved.~{ See Ian Murdock, /{A Brief History of Debian}/, (January
6, 1994): Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto," \\
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html. }~

Shortly after the /{Manifesto's}/ release, the Free Software Foundation made
its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its distribution
"GNU/Linux." At first, Stallman proposed the term "Lignux" - combining the
names Linux and GNU - but the initial reaction was very negative, and this
convinced Stallman to go with the longer but less criticized GNU/Linux.
={ Lignux (Linux with GNU) }

Some dismissed Stallman's attempt to add the "GNU" prefix as a belated quest
for credit, never mind whether it was due, but Murdock saw it differently.
Looking back, Murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension
between the GNU Project's developers and those who adapted GNU programs to use
with the Linux kernel. "There was a split emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard
was concerned."
={ C programming language :
     glibc +3 ;
   glibc (GNU C Library) +3 ;
   GNU C Library (glibc) +3
}

By 1990, each GNU program had a designated maintainer-in-charge. Some GNU
programs could run on many different systems, and users often contributed
changes to port them to another system. Often these users knew only that one
system, and did not consider how to keep the code clean for other systems. To
add support for the new system while keeping the code comprehensible, so it
could be maintained reliably for all systems, then required rewriting much of
the changes. The maintainer-in-charge had the responsibility to critique the
changes and tell their user-authors how to redo parts of the port. Generally
they were eager to do this so that their changes would be integrated into the
standard version. Then the maintainer-in-charge would edit in there worked
changes, and take care of them in future maintenance. For some GNU programs,
this had happened dozens of times for dozens of different systems.

The programmers who adapted various GNU programs to work with the kernel Linux
followed this common path: they considered only their own platform. But when
the maintainers-in-charge asked them to help clean up their changes for future
maintenance, several of them were not interested. They did not care about doing
the correct thing, or about facilitating future maintenance of the GNU packages
they had adapted. They cared only about their own versions and were inclined to
maintain them as forks.

In the hacker world, forks are an interesting issue. Although the hacker ethic
permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given program's source
code, it is considered correct behavior to offer to work with the original
developer to maintain a joint version. Hackers usually find it useful, as well
as proper, to pour their improvements into the program's principal version. A
free software license gives every hacker the right to fork a program, and
sometimes it is necessary, but doing so without need or cause is considered
somewhat rude.
={ forks (code) +3 ;
   tree (source code)
}

As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative
effects of a software fork in 1991. Says Stallman, "Lucid hired several people
to write improvements to GNU Emacs, meant to be contributions to it; but the
developers did not inform me about the project. Instead they designed several
new features on their own. As you might expect, I agreed with some of their
decisions and disagreed with others. They asked me to incorporate all their
code, but when I said I wanted to use about half of it, they declined to help
me adapt that half to work on its own. I had to do it on my own." The fork had
given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.~{
Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla
development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork,
titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism.", at \\ http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html.
Stallman's response to those accusations is in \\
http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin. }~
={ Emacs text editor :
     Lucid software company and ;
   GNU Emacs :
     Lucid software company and ;
   Lucid software company
}

Now programmers had forked several of the principal GNU packages at once. At
first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of impatience. In
contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the Linux team, GNU source-code
maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that
might affect a program's long-term viability. They also were unafraid of
harshly critiquing other people's code. Over time, however, Stallman began to
sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its
objectives when reading Linux developers' emails.

"We discovered that the people who considered themselves 'Linux users' didn't
care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, 'Why should I bother
doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project. It [the program]'s
working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to
us.' And that was quite surprising, given that people were essentially using a
variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than
anybody else about GNU." Fooled by their own practice of calling the
combination "Linux," they did not realize that their system was more GNU than
Linux.

For the sake of unity, Stallman asked the maintainers-in-charge to do the work
which normally the change authors should have done. In most cases this was
feasible, but not in glibc. Short for GNU C Library, glibc is the package that
all programs use to make "system calls" directed at the kernel, in this case
Linux. User programs on a Unix-like system communicate with the kernel only
through the C library.

The changes to make glibc work as a communication channel between Linux and all
the other programs in the system were major and ad-hoc, written without
attention to their effect on other platforms. For the glibc
maintainer-in-charge, the task of cleaning them up was daunting. Instead the
Free Software Foundation paid him to spend most of a year reimplementing these
changes from scratch, to make glibc version 6 work "straight out of the box" in
GNU/Linux.

Murdock says this was the precipitating cause that motivated Stallman to insist
on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The
fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the
Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might
be a force for disunity."

While some viewed it as politically grasping to describe the combination of GNU
and Linux as a "variant" of GNU, Murdock, already sympathetic to the free
software cause, saw Stallman's request to call Debian's version GNU/Linux as
reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit," he says.

Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. Although Murdock had been
accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the
design and development model of the actual software. What had begun as a show
of solidarity soon became a running disagreement.

"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements with him," says Murdock
with a laugh. "In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work
with." The principal disagreement was over debugging. Stallman wanted to
include debugging information in all executable programs, to enable users to
immediately investigate any bugs they might encounter. Murdock thought this
would make the system files too big and interfere with distribution. Neither
was willing to change his mind.

In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand over
the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been ceding management
duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on Electric Fence, a
Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix
programmer who had become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the operating
system's Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock, Perens sympathized
with the political agenda of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit
from afar.
={ Electric Fence Unix utility ;
   Perens, Bruce +3
}

"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the /{GNU Manifesto}/, GNU
Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for
Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s.
"I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand
and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, 'I work as a
consultant to produce free-software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I
thought his answer made perfect sense."

As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock's design
battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development
team, Perens says he made the command decision to distance Debian from the Free
Software Foundation. "I decided we did not want Richard's style of
micro-management," he says.

According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the
wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent a message
that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we call it GNU/Linux
and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made the decision unilaterally.
Everybody breathed a sigh of relief."

Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the hacker's version of
GNU/Linux, alongside Slackware, another popular distribution founded during the
same 1993-1994 period. However, Slackware contained some non-free programs, and
Debian after its separation from GNU began distributing non-free programs
too.~{ Debian Buzz in June 1996 contained non-free Netscape 3.01 in its Contrib
section. }~ Despite labeling them as "non-free" and saying that they were "not
officially part of Debian," proposing these programs to the user implied a kind
of endorsement for them. As the GNU Project became aware of these policies, it
came to recognize that neither Slackware nor Debian was a GNU/Linux distro it
could recommend to the public.
={ Gilmore, John ;
   Young, Robert +2 ;
   Red Hat Inc. ;
   Teimann, Michael ;
   Slackware
}

Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, GNU/Linux was picking up
steam in the commercial Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company
billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to focus on GNU/Linux. The
chief executive officer was Robert Young, the former /{Linux Journal}/ editor
who in 1994 had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any
regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds' response
had a "profound" impact on his own view toward GNU/Linux. Instead of looking
for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software tactics,
Young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same
approach as Debian - i.e., building an operating system completely out of free
software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and
John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free
software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same
approach with GNU/Linux?

"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says
Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business,
this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of
[the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.~{ Young uses the
term "public domain" loosely here. Strictly speaking, it means "not
copyrighted." Code released under the GNU GPL cannot be in the public domain,
since it must be copyrighted in order for the GNU GPL to apply. }~ If you're an
independent software vendor and you're trying to build some application and you
need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP
off of Red Hat [GNU/]Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool.
If you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own graphic
library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of
what went before. And suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on
software management and more on writing the applications specific to your
customer's needs." However, Young was no free software activist, and readily
included non-free programs in Red Hat's GNU/Linux system.

Young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by the business efficiencies
of free software. By late 1996, most Unix companies were starting to wake up
and smell the brewing source code. The GNU/Linux sector was still a good year
or two away from full commercial breakout mode, but those close enough to the
hacker community could feel it: something big was happening. The Intel 386
chip, the Internet, and the World Wide Web had hit the marketplace like a set
of monster waves; free software seemed like the largest wave yet.

For Ian Murdock, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a fitting
punishment for the man who had spent so much time giving the free software
movement an identity. Like many Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the
original postings. He'd seen Torvalds' original admonition that Linux was "just
a hobby." He'd also seen Torvalds' admission to Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum:
"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even
start my project."~{ This quote is taken from the much publicized
Torvalds-Tanenbaum "flame war" following the initial release of Linux. In the
process of defending his choice of a non-portable monolithic kernel design,
Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to learn more about his new
386 PC. "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to
even start my project." See Chris DiBona et al., /{Open Sources}/ (O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc., 1999): 224. }~ Like many, Murdock knew that some
opportunities had been missed. He also knew the excitement of watching new
opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the Internet.
={ Tanenbaum, Andrew }

"Being involved with Linux in those early days was fun," recalls Murdock. "At
the same time, it was something to do, something to pass the time. If you go
back and read those old [comp.os.minix]exchanges, you'll see the sentiment:
this is something we can play with until the Hurd is ready. People were
anxious. It's funny, but in a lot of ways, I suspect that Linux would never
have happened if the Hurd had come along more quickly."

By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions were already moot,
because Torvalds' kernel had gained a critical mass of users. The 36-month
window had closed, meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its Hurd
kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the hard-core hacker community would
have noticed. Linux, by filling the GNU system's last gap, had achieved the GNU
Project's goal of producing a Unix-like free software operating system.
However, most of the users did not recognize what had happened: they thought
the whole system was Linux, and that Torvalds had done it all. Most of them
installed distributions that came with non-free software; with Torvalds as
their ethical guide, they saw no principled reason to reject it. Still, a
precarious freedom was available for those that appreciated it.
={ HURD kernel }

1~ Chapter 11 - Open Source
={ GNU Project :
     open source movement and +59 ;
   open source +59 ;
   Stallman, Richard M. :
     open source and +59
}

[RMS: In this chapter only, I have deleted some quotations. The material
deleted was about open source and didn't relate to my life or my work.]

In November, 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and
author of the 1994 book, /{A Quarter Century of Unix}/, issued a call for
papers to members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing list. Salus,
the conference's scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the
upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996, and sponsored by the Free Software
Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely
dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software
programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD,
FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and
redistributable." Salus wrote:
={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) ;
   FSF (Free Software Foundation) ;
   FreeBSD ;
   Conference on Freely Redistributable Software +1 ;
   Linux ;
   NetBSD ;
   Perl programming language ;
   386BSD ;
   Salus, Peter +4
}

_1 Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous.
This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of
freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various
media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by
Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.~{ See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on
Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry
Winograd), \\
http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/fsf96/call-for-papers.html. }~

Among the recipients of Salus' email was conference committee member Eric S.
Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other
members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker
community for some software projects and as editor of /{The New Hacker's
Dictionary}/, a greatly enlarged version of /{The Hacker's Dictionary}/
published a decade earlier by Guy Steele.
={ New Hacker Dictionary, The ;
   Raymond, Eric :
     open source and +56
}

For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Although he did not
thoroughly support the free software movement's ideas, he had contributed to
some GNU programs, in particular to GNU Emacs. Those contributions stopped in
1992, when Raymond demanded authority to make changes in the official GNU
version of GNU Emacs without discussing them with Stallman, who was directly in
charge of Emacs development. Stallman rejected the demand, and Raymond accused
Stallman of "micro-management." "Richard kicked up a fuss about my making
unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries,"
Raymond recalls. "It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn't want to work
with him anymore."

Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software
community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman
and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With
Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and
Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the
pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial,
especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I
sort of had afoot in both camps," Raymond says.

By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become
palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though:the conference was their
first chance to meet the Finnish /{wunderkind}/ in the flesh. Surprisingly,
Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a
slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick,
self-effacing wit.~{ Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is
Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" at \\
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ offers a brief explanation:Finland has a
significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call
themselves finlands svensk or finlands svenskar and consider themselves Finns;
many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of
Finland's two official languages. }~

Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take
potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of
all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker,
half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.

"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before 1996, Richard was the only
credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People
who dissented didn't do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was
Torvalds."

The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. During a
discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar
topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft's PowerPoint slideshow
software program. From the perspective of old-line software purists, it was
like bragging about one's slaves at an abolitionist conference. From the
perspective of Torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common
sense. Why shun convenient proprietary software programs just to make a point?
They didn't agree with the point anyway. When freedom requires a sacrifice,
those who don't care about freedom see the sacrifice as self-denial, rather
than as a way to obtain something important. Being a hacker wasn't about
self-denial, it was about getting the job done, and "the job," for them, was
defined in practical terms.
={ Windows (Microsoft) ;
   Microsoft Corporation +3 ;
   PowerPoint (Microsoft) +3 ;
   proprietary software :
     Torvalds, Linus and ;
   Torvalds, Linus :
     PowerPoint and +3
}

"That was a pretty shocking thing to say," Raymond remembers. "Then again, he
was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout."

Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the 1996conference; he
probably wasn't present when Torvalds made that statement. But he does remember
later feeling the sting of Torvalds' celebrated "cheekiness." "There was a
thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards
and then tear them up," says Stallman, recalling one example. "When you look
closely, what he disagreed with was the least important part of it, the
recommendation for how to indent C code."

"OK, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. That's fine, bu the picked a
singularly nasty way of saying so. He could have just said,'Here's the way I
think you should indent your code.' Fine. There should be no hostility there."

For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds' comments
confirmed a suspicion: the dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU
developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had
grown up in a world of proprietary software. They had begun contributing to
free software without perceiving any injustice in non-free software. For most
of them, nothing was at stake beyond convenience. Unless a program was
technically inferior, they saw little reason to reject it on licensing issues
alone. Some day hackers might develop a free software alternative to
PowerPoint. Until then, why criticize PowerPoint or Microsoft; why not use it?

This was an example of the growing dispute, within the free software community,
between those who valued freedom as such, and those who mainly valued powerful,
reliable software. Stallman referred to the two camps as political parties
within the community, calling the former the "freedom party." The supporters of
the other camp did not try to name it, so Stallman disparagingly called it the
"bandwagon party" or the "success party," because many of them presented "more
users" as the primary goal.

In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome
reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence
both in terms of software design and people management. This was partly true,
but the reputation provided a convenient excuse that anyone could cite if
Stallman did not do as he wished. The reputation has been augmented by mistaken
guesses.

For example, shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software Foundation
experienced a full-scale staff defection. Brian Youmans, a current FSF staffer
hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "At one
point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office." The
previous staff were unhappy with the executive director; as Bryt Bradley told
her friends in December, 1995:

_1 [name omitted] (the Executive Director of the FSF) decided to come back from
Medical/Political Leave last week. The office staff (Gena Bean, Mike Drain, and
myself) decided we could not work with her as our supervisor because of the
many mistakes she had made in her job tasks prior to her taking a leave. Also,
there had been numerous instances where individuals were threatened with
inappropriate firing and there were many instances of what we felt were verbal
abuse from her to ALL members of the office staff. We requested (many times)
that she not come back as our supervisor, but stated that we were willing to
work with her as a co-worker. Our requests were ignored. We quit.

The executive director in question then gave Stallman an ultimatum: give her
total autonomy in the office or she would quit. Stallman, as president of the
FSF, declined to give her total control over its activities, so she resigned,
and he recruited in Peter Salus to replace her.

When Raymond, an outsider, learned that these people had left the FSF, he
presumed Stallman was at fault. This provided confirmation for his theory that
Stallman's personality was the cause of any and all problems in the GNU
Project.

Raymond had another theory: recent delays such as the Hurd and recent troubles
such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with
software project management, not software code development.

Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began
working on his own pet software project, a mail utility called "fetchmail."
Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise
to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began
sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating
a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the
success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the
Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as
a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of
central planning.
={ fetchmail ;
   FreeBSD ;
   Conference on Freely Redistributable Software ;
   Internet
}

What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks' Law.
First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author
of the 1975 book, /{The Mythical Man-Month}/, Brooks' Law held that adding
developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as
most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks,
Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks
into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found a way to make the resulting
software /{better}/.~{ Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following
quote taken from Brooks' book:Since software construction is inherently a
systems effort - an exercise in complex interrelationships - communication
effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time
brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens,
the schedule. See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley
Publishing, 1995). }~
={ Brooks, Fred P. ;
   Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks)
}

Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech, which he
promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in Chester County,
Pennsylvania. Dubbed "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the speech contrasted the
"Bazaar" style originated by Torvalds with the "Cathedral" style generally used
by everyone else.
={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) +10 ;
   Linux Kongress +6
}

Raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as
the one he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of GNU/Linux
users in Germany the next spring.

"At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the speech,"
Raymond recalls. "I took that as significant for two reasons. For one thing, it
meant they were excited by what they were hearing. For another thing, it meant
they were excited even after hearing the speech delivered through a language
barrier."

Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar." The paper drew its name from Raymond's central
analogy. Previously, programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally planned
monuments built to stand the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more
like "a great babbling bazaar," a software program developed through the loose
decentralizing dynamics of the Internet.

Raymond's paper associated the Cathedral style, which he and Stallman and many
others had used, specifically with the GNU Project and Stallman, thus casting
the contrast between development models as a comparison between Stallman and
Torvalds. Where Stallman was his chosen example of the classic cathedral
architect - i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for 18 months and
return with something like the GNU C Compiler - Torvalds was more like a genial
dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux design discussion and
stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, Torvalds had created a
development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. From
Torvalds' perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing
control but keeping the ideas flowing.

Summarized Raymond, "I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was
not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of
the Linux development model."~{ See Eric Raymond, "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar" (1997). }~

If the paper's description of these two styles of development was perceptive,
its association of the Cathedral model specifically with Stallman (rather than
all the others who had used it, including Raymond himself) was sheer calumny.
In fact, the developers of some GNU packages including the GNU Hurd had read
about and adopted Torvalds' methods before Raymond tried them, though without
analyzing them further and publicly championing them as Raymond's paper did.
Thousands of hackers, reading Raymond's article, must have been led to a
negative attitude towards GNU by this smear.

In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds' managerial success, Raymond attracted
the attention of other members of the free software community for whom freedom
was not a priority. They sought to interest business in the use and development
of free software, and to do so, decided to cast the issue in terms of the
values that appeal to business: powerful, reliable, cheap, advanced. Raymond
became the best-known proponent of these ideas, and they reached the management
of Netscape, whose proprietary browser was losing market share to Microsoft's
equally proprietary Internet Explorer. Intrigued by a speech by Raymond,
Netscape executives took the message back to corporate headquarters. A few
months later, in January, 1998, the company announced its plan to publish the
source code of its flagship Navigator web browser in the hopes of enlisting
hacker support in future development.
={ Netscape +8 ;
   source code :
     Netscape +4
}

% ={Monterey (California);O'Reilly, Tim;O'Reilly & Associates}
% ={Apache web server;BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);Wall, Larry;Perl programming language;Python programming language;sendmail Unix mail program}
% ={Mountain View (California);Netscape+8}

When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar"
essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly
elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. He invited a few people
including Larry Augustin, founder of VA Research which sold workstations with
the GNU/Linux operating system pre-installed; Tim O'Reilly, founder of the
publisher O'Reilly& Associates; and Christine Peterson, president of the
Foresight Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nano
technology, to talk. "The meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take
advantage of Netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?"
={ Augustin, Larry ;
   Foresight Institute ;
   VA Research ;
   Peterson, Christine +4 ;
   Barksdale, Jim
}

Raymond doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember
the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other
hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for
freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting through. Most business
executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as
synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow-up messages in short order.
Until hackers found a way to get past this misunderstanding, the free software
movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape.

Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free
software cause, offered an alternative: "open source."

Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the "open source" term while
discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry.
She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from
another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.~{ See
Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," Tech-Web News
(August 26, 1998), \\
http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle?articleID=29102344. }~

At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different. "I was
hesitant about suggesting it," Peterson recalls. "I had no standing with the
group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." To
Peterson's surprise, the term caught on. By the end of the meeting, most of the
attendees, including Raymond, seemed pleased by it.

Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for
"free software" until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when
O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free-software. Calling his
meeting "the Freeware Summit," O'Reilly says he wanted to direct media and
community attention to the other deserving projects that had also encouraged
Netscape to release Mozilla. "All these guys had so much in common, and I was
surprised they didn't all know each other," says O'Reilly. "I also wanted to
let the world know just how great an impact the free software culture had
already made. People were missing out on a large part of the free-software
tradition."
={ Freeware Summit ;
   O'Reilly, Tim :
     open source and +8
}

In putting together the invite list, however, O'Reilly made a decision that
would have long-term political consequences. He decided to limit the list to
west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman, creator of send mail, and Paul
Vixie, creator of BIND. There were exceptions, of course: Pennsylvania-resident
Raymond, who was already in town thanks to the Mozilla launch, earned an quick
invite. So did Virginia-resident Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. "Frank
Willison, my editor in chief and champion of Python within the company, invited
him without first checking in with me," O'Reilly recalls. "I was happy to have
him there, but when I started, it really was just a local gathering."
={ van Rossum, Guido ;
   Python programming language ;
   BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon) ;
   Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND) ;
   Wall, Larry ;
   Perl programming language ;
   Python programming language ;
   sendmail Unix mail program
}

For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman's name on the list
qualified as a snub. "I decided not to go to the event because of it," says
Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he argued for
Stallman's inclusion to no avail. The snub rumor gained additional strength
from the fact that O'Reilly, the event's host, had feuded publicly with
Stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. Prior to the meeting,
Stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and
modifiable as free software programs. O'Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a
value-added market for non-free books increased the utility of free software by
making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also disputed the
title of the event, with Stallman insisting on "Free Software" rather than
"Freeware." The latter term most often refers to programs which are available
gratis, but which are not free software because their source code is not
released.

Looking back, O'Reilly doesn't see the decision to leave Stallman's name off
the invite list as a snub. "At that time, I had never met Richard in person,
but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible and unwilling to engage in
dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU tradition was represented at the
meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally,
and whom I knew were passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more
willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses
of the various free software projects and traditions. Given all the later
brouhaha, I do wish I'd invited Richard as well, but I certainly don't think
that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the GNU
Project or for Richard personally."
={ Gilmore, John ;
   Tiemann, Michael +7
}

Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open-source" won over
just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas
and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. Of
key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly
in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux
challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the
discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free
software." O'Reilly, the summit host, remembers a comment from Torvalds, a
summit attendee.

"Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained how
only recently that he had learned that the word 'free' had two meanings - free
as in 'libre' and free as in 'gratis' - in English."

Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus, proposed an alternative to the troublesome
"free software" term: sourceware. "Nobody got too excited about it," O'Reilly
recalls. "That's when Eric threw out the term 'open source.'"

Although the term appealed to some, support for a change in offcial terminology
was far from unanimous. At the end of the one-day conference, attendees put the
three terms - free software, open source, or sourceware - to a vote. According
to O'Reilly, 9 out of the 15 attendees voted for "open source." Although some
still quibbled with the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future
discussions with the press. "We wanted to go out with a solidarity message,"
O'Reilly says.

The term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after the
summit, O'Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by
reporters from the /{New York Times}/, the /{Wall Street Journal}/, and other
prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds' face was appearing on
the cover of /{Forbes}/ magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl creator
Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian Behlendorf featured in the interior
spread. Open source was open for business.
={ Wall, Larry }

For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity message was the most
important thing. Although his company had achieved a fair amount of success
selling free software tools and services, he sensed the difficulty other
programmers and entrepreneurs faced.

"There's no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a lot of
situations," Tiemann says. "Open source positioned itself as being business
friendly and business sensible. Free software positioned itself as morally
righteous. For better or worse we figured it was more advantageous to align
with the open source crowd.

Raymond called Stallman after the meeting to tell him about the new term "open
source" and ask if he would use it. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered
adopting the term, only to discard it. "I know because I had direct personal
conversations about it," Raymond says.

Stallman's immediate response was, "I'll have to think about it." The following
day he had concluded that the values of Raymond and O'Reilly would surely
dominate the future discourse of "open source," and that the best way to keep
the ideas of the free software movement in public view was to stick to its
traditional term.

Later in 1998, Stallman announced his position: "open source," while helpful in
communicating the technical advantages of free software also encouraged
speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. It avoided the unintended
meaning of "gratis software" and the intended meaning of "freedom-respecting
software" equally. As a means for conveying the latter meaning, it was
therefore no use. In effect, Raymond and O'Reilly had given a name to the
non-idealistic political party in the community, the one Stallman did not agree
with.

In addition, Stallman thought that the ideas of "open source" led people to put
too much emphasis on winning the support of business. While such support in
itself wasn't necessarily bad in itself, he expected that being too desperate
for it would lead to harmful compromises. "Negotiation 101 would teach you that
if you are desperate to get someone's agreement, you are asking for a bad
deal," he says. "You need to be prepared to say no." Summing up his position at
the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds himself as
a "coming out party" for the "Linux" community, Stallman implored his fellow
hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise.
={ LinuxWorld Conventions +2 }

"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate to work
with companies or compromise our goals," Stallman said during a panel
discussion. "Let them offer and we'll accept. We don't have to change what
we're doing to get them to help us. You can take a single step towards a goal,
then another and then more and more and you'll actually reach your goal. Or,
you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another step, and
you'll never get there."

Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an increased
willingness to alienate open source supporters. A few months after the Freeware
Summit, O'Reilly hosted its second annual Perl Conference. This time around,
Stallman was in attendance. During a panel discussion lauding IBM's decision to
employ the free software Apache web server in its commercial offerings,
Stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, made a sharp denunciation
of panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language. Stallman
branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a
proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's startup company, Scriptics.
Ousterhout had stated that Scriptics would contribute only the barest minimum
of its improvements to the free version of Tcl, meaning it would in effect use
that small contribution to win community approval for much a larger amount of
non-free software development. Stallman rejected this position and denounced
Scriptics' plans. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for the continued
existenceof Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.~{
Ibid. }~
={ Apache web server ;
   IBM :
     Apache web server and ;
   Ousterhout, John ;
   Tcl scripting language +1 ;
   Scriptics
}

"It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin. "John's
done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a real contributor."
Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt empathy
for those troubled by Stallman's discordant words.
={ Morin, Rich +1 ;
   Prime Time Freeware ;
   Sprite
}

Stallman will not apologize. "Criticizing proprietary software isn't ugly -
proprietary software is ugly. Ousterhout had indeed made real contributions in
the past, but the point is that Scriptics was going to be nearly 100% a
proprietary software company. In that conference, standing up for freedom meant
disagreeing with nearly everyone. Speaking from the audience, I could only say
a few sentences. The only way to raise the issue so it would not be immediately
forgotten was to put it in strong terms."

"If people rebuke me for 'making a scene' when I state a serious criticism of
someone's conduct, while calling Torvalds 'cheeky' for saying nastier things
about trivial matters, that seems like a double standard to me."

Stallman's controversial criticism of Ousterhout momentarily alienated a
potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching
the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use
of the term "open source" and provide a definition for companies interested in
making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.~{
See Bruce Perens et al., "The Open Source Definition," The Open Source
Initiative (1998), \\ http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. }~
={ OSI (Open Source Initiative) ;
   Open Source Initiative (OSI) ;
   Perens, Bruce +1
}

Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization
had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on
the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation's
auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for
distance. "I really like and admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard
would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away
from free-software for a couple of months."

Stallman's energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum
of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a
stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying /{New York Times}/ article
described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free
software and opensource."~{ See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System,"
New York Times (September 28, 1998), \\
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html. }~ Six
months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computerwas proclaiming the
company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article
headline.~{ See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts 'Open Source' for its Server
Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999), \\
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html. }~
={ Apache web server ;
   Apple Computers :
     open source software and ;
   Intel ;
   Markoff, John ;
   Red Hat Inc. :
     success of +1
}

Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that
actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company
that now eagerly billed itself as "opensource," was selling shares on Nasdaq.
In December, VA Linux -formerly VA Research - was floating its own IPO to
historic effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded
past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239
level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end
experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record. Eric Raymond, as
a board member, owned shares worth $36 million. However, these high prices were
temporary; they tumbled when the dot-com boom ended.
={ VA Linux +1 ;
   VA Research
}

The open source proponents' message was simple: all you need, to sell the free
software concept, is to make it business-friendly. They saw Stallman and the
free software movement as fighting the market;they sought instead to leverage
it. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the
game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process.

These methods won great success for open source, but not for the ideals of free
software. What they had done to "spread the message" was to omit the most
important part of it: the idea of freedom as an ethical issue. The effects of
this omission are visible today: as of 2009, nearly all GNU/Linux distributions
include proprietary programs, Torvalds' version of Linux contains proprietary
firmware programs, and the company formerly called VA Linux bases its business
on proprietary software. Over half of all the world's web servers run some
version of Apache, and the usual version of Apache is free software, but many
of those sites run a proprietary modified version distributed by IBM.

"On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired to
hijack his revolution," Raymond says. "Richard's rejection of the term open
source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes
from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There are people out there who
think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't believe that. It's more that he
so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any
threat to that as a threat to himself."

Stallman responds, "Raymond misrepresents my views: I don't think Torvalds
'conspired' with anyone, since being sneaky is not his way. However, Raymond's
nasty conduct is visible in those statements themselves. Rather than respond to
my views (even as he claims they are) on their merits, he proposes
psychological interpretations for them. He attributes the harshest
interpretation to unnamed others, then 'defends' me by proposing a slightly
less derogatory one. He has often 'defended' me this way."

Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as
Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader - but it would lead many
to misunderstand what he is a leader of. Since the free software movement lacks
the corporate and media recognition of open source, most users of GNU/Linux do
not hear that it exists, let alone what its views are. They have heard the
ideas and values of opensource, and they never imagine that Stallman might have
different ones. Thus he receives messages thanking him for his advocacy of
"open source," and explains in response that he has never been a supporter of
that, using the occasion to inform the sender about free-software.

Some writers recognize the term "free software" by using the term "FLOSS,"
which stands for "Free/Libre and Open Source Software." However, they often say
there is a single "FLOSS" movement, which is like saying that the U.S. has a
"Liberal/Conservative" movement, and the views they usually associate with this
supposed single movement are the open source views they have heard.

Despite all these obstacles, the free software movement does make its ideas
heard sometimes, and continues to grow in absolute terms. By sticking to its
guns, and presenting its ideas in contrast to those of open source, it gains
ground. "One of Stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't
budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up to a decade for people to come around
to his point of view if that's what it takes."

Murdock, for one, finds that un-budgeable nature both refreshing and valuable.
Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement,
but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "You always know
that he's going to be consistent in his views," Murdock says. "Most people
aren't like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect
that."

1~ Chapter 12 - A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell

[RMS: In this chapter my only change is to add a few notes labeled like this
one.]

Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car,
waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown Kihei.
={ Kihei (Hawaii) +15 }

The two of us are headed to the nearby town of Pa'ia, where we are scheduled to
meet up with some software programmers and their wives for dinner in about an
hour or so.
={ Pa'ia (Hawaii) +2 }

It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High Performance
Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems
profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities, Kihei is a one-dimensional
exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down its main drag, with its endless
succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not
to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a
giant commercial tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side
roads. With nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches.
200 yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light is
yellow again.

For Stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of spending
the better part of a sunny Hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow traffic is enough
to trigger an embolism. [RMS: Since I was driving, I was also losing time to
answer my email, and that's a real pain since I can barely keep up anyway.]
Even worse is the knowledge that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter
mile back, this whole situation easily could have been avoided. Unfortunately,
we are at the mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who
knows the way and who has decided to take us to Pa'ia via the scenic route
instead of via the nearby Pilani Highway.

"This is terrible," says Stallman between frustrated sighs. "Why didn't we take
the other route?"

Again, the light a quarter mile ahead of us turns green. Again, we creep
forward a few more car lengths. This process continues for another 10 minutes,
until we finally reach a major crossroad promising access to the adjacent
highway.

The driver ahead of us ignores it and continues through the intersection.

"Why isn't he turning?" moans Stallman, throwing up his hands in frustration.
"Can you believe this?"

I decide not to answer either. I find the fact that I am sitting in a car with
Stallman in the driver seat, in Maui no less, unbelievable enough. Until two
hours ago, I didn't even know Stallman knew how to drive. Now, listening to
Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing the mournful bass notes of "Appalachian Journey" on
the car stereo and watching the sunset pass by on our left, I do my best to
fade into the upholstery.

When the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, Stallman hits his right
turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. No such luck. Once
again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a stop a good 200
yards before the next light. By now, Stallman is livid.

"It's like he's deliberately ignoring us," he says, gesturing and pantomiming
like an air craft carrier landing-signals officer in a futile attempt to catch
our guide's eye. The guide appears unfazed, and for the next five minutes all
we see is a small portion of his head in the rear-view mirror.

I look out Stallman's window. Nearby Kahoolawe and Lanai Islands provide an
ideal frame for the setting sun. It's a breathtaking view, the kind that makes
moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a Hawaiian native, I suppose. I
try to direct Stallman's attention to it, but Stallman, by now obsessed by the
inattentiveness of the driver ahead of us, blows me off.
={ Lanai Islands (Hawaii) }

When the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring a
"Pilani Highway Next Right," I grit my teeth. I remember an early warning
relayed to me by BSD programmer Keith Bostic. "Stallman does not suffer fools
gladly," Bostic warned me. "If somebody says or does something stupid, he'll
look them in the eye and say, 'That's stupid.'"
={ Bostic, Keith }

Looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, I realize that it's the stupidity,
not the inconvenience, that's killing Stallman right now.

"It's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to get there
efficiently," Stallman says.

The word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things irritate
the hacker mind more than inefficiency. It was the inefficiency of checking the
Xerox laser printer two or three times a day that triggered Stallman's initial
inquiry into the printer source code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting
software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors that led Stallman to
battle Symbolics and to launch the GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once
opined, hell is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid
mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that Stallman's entire life has been
an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths.
={ Sartre, Jean Paul }

This hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we take in the slowly
passing scenery. With its multitude of shops, parking lots, and poorly timed
street lights, Kihei seems less like a city and more like a poorly designed
software program writ large. Instead of rerouting traffic and distributing
vehicles through side streets and expressways, city planners have elected to
run everything through a single main drag. From a hacker perspective, sitting
in a car amidst all this mess is like listening to a CD rendition of nails on a
chalkboard at full volume.

"Imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes Steven Levy, another warning I
should have listened to before climbing into the car with Stallman. "This is
one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars - the system of randomly
programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which
are so goddamn /{unnecessary}/ [Levy's emphasis] that the impulse is to
rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . re-design the entire
system."~{ See Steven Levy, /{Hackers}/ (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 40. }~

More frustrating, however, is the duplicity of our trusted guide. Instead of
searching out a clever shortcut - as any true hacker would do on instinct - the
driver ahead of us has instead chosen to play along with the city planners'
game. Like Virgil in Dante's /{Inferno}/, our guide is determined to give us
the full guided tour of this hacker hell whether we want it or not.

Before I can make this observation to Stallman, the driver finally hits his
right turn signal. Stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and for a
moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. The tension comes back,
however, as the driver in front of us slows down. "Construction Ahead" signs
line both sides of the street, and even though the Pilani Highway lies less
than a quarter mile off in the distance, the two-lane road between us and the
highway is blocked by a dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt.

It takes Stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our guide begins
executing a clumsy five-point U-turn in front of us. When he catches a glimpse
of the bulldozer and the "No Through Access" signs just beyond, Stallman
finally boils over.

"Why, why, why?" he whines, throwing his head back. "You should have known the
road was blocked. You should have known this way wouldn't work. You did this
deliberately." [RMS: I meant that he chose the slow road deliberately. As
explained below, I think these quotes are not exact.]

The driver finishes the turn and passes us on the way back toward the main
drag. As he does so, he shakes his head and gives us an apologetic shrug.
Coupled with a toothy grin, the driver's gesture reveals a touch of mainlander
frustration but is tempered with a protective dose of islander fatalism. Coming
through the sealed windows of our rental car, it spells out a succinct message:
"Hey, it's Maui; what are you gonna do?"

Stallman can take it no longer.

"Don't you fucking smile!" he shouts, fogging up the glass as he does so. "It's
your fucking fault. This all could have been so much easier if we had just done
it my way." [RMS: These quotes appear to be inaccurate, because I don't use
"fucking" as an adverb. This was not an interview, so Williams would not have
had a tape recorder running. I'm sure things happened overall as described, but
these quotations probably reflect his understanding rather than my words.]

Stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and pulling
himself towards it twice. The image of Stallman's lurching frame is like that
of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined
by the tone of Stallman's voice. Halfway between anger and anguish, Stallman
seems to be on the verge of tears.

Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum
ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps, Stallman shifts the
car into reverse and begins executing his own U-turn. By the time we are back
on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30
minutes earlier.

It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This one offers
easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward Pa'ia
at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that once loomed bright and yellow over
Stallman's left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rear-view
mirror. It lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on
both sides of the highway.
={ Pa'ia (Hawaii) }

For the next 20 minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the ambient
hum of the car's engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and a violin trio
playing the mournful strains of an Appalachian folktune.

1~ Chapter 13 - Continuing the Fight

For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a
convenient ally.

Four years after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes over the
Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds' elevation to the role
of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing
at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional
poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a light-saber
like Luke Skywalker, while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still
grates on Stallman's nerves not only because it depicts him as Torvalds'
sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the
free-software community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. "It's
ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus
refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement,
and then he won't fight. What good is it?"
={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) ;
   Luke Skywalker ;
   R2D2 ;
   Torvalds, Linus +1 ;
 Star Wars
}

Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on Torvalds'
part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the
hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to
admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his
organization. Relegated to the periphery by the ironic success of the GNU/Linux
system because users thought of it as "Linux," Stallman has nonetheless
successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January
2000and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries
where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones -China and India,
for example.

Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has taken advantage of the leverage of the
GNU General Public License (GPL), of which he remains the steward. During the
summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO
bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major victories.
In July, 2000, Troll tech, a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a
graphical interface library that ran on the GNU/Linux operating system,
announced it was licensing its software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun
Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the
open source bandwagon without actually contributing its code, finally relented
and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice~{ Sun was
compelled by a trademark complaint to use the clumsy name "OpenOffice.org." }~
application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License(LGPL) and the Sun
Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) :
     QT graphic tools and ;
   GNU General Public License :
     QT graphics tools and ;
   Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) ;
   OpenOffice application suite +4 ;
   Qt +1 ;
   Troll Tech +1 ;
   SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source Licence) ;
   Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) ;
   Sun Microsystems :
     OpenOffice application suite
}

In the case of Trolltech, this victory was the result of a protracted effort by
the GNU Project. The non-freeness of Qt was a serious problem for the free
software community because KDE, a free graphical desktop environment that was
becoming popular, depended on it. Qt was non-free software but Trolltech had
invited free software projects(such as KDE) to use it gratis. Although KDE
itself was free software, users that insisted on freedom couldn't run it, since
they had to reject Qt. Stallman recognized that many users would want a
graphical desktop on GNU/Linux, and most would not value freedom enough to
reject the temptation of KDE, with Qt hiding within. The danger was that
GNU/Linux would become a motor for the installation of KDE, and therefore also
of non-free Qt. This would undermine the freedom which was the purpose of GNU.

To deal with this danger, Stallman recruited people to launch two parallel
counter projects. One was GNOME, the GNU free graphical desktop environment.
The other was Harmony, a compatible free replacement for Qt. If GNOME
succeeded, KDE would not be necessary; if Harmony succeeded, KDE would not need
Qt. Either way, users would be able to have a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux
without non-free Qt.

In 1999, these two efforts were making good progress, and the management of
Trolltech were starting to feel the pressure. So Trolltech released Qt under
its own free software license, the QPL. The QPL qualified as a free license,
but Stallman pointed out the drawback of incompatibility with the GPL: in
general, combining GPL-covered code with Qt in one program was impossible
without violating one license or the other. Eventually the Trolltech management
recognized that the GPL would serve their purposes equally well, and released
Qt with dual licensing: the same Qt code, in parallel, was available under the
GNU GPL and under the QPL. After three years, this was victory.

Once Qt was free, the motive for developing Harmony (which wasn't complete
enough for actual use) had disappeared, and the developers abandoned it. GNOME
had acquired substantial momentum, so its development continued, and it remains
the main GNU graphical desktop.

Sun desired to play according to the Free Software Foundation's conditions. At
the 1999 O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief
scientist Bill Joy defended his company's "community source" license,
essentially a watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify Sun-owned
software but not sell copies of said software without negotiating a royalty
agreement with Sun. (With this restriction, the license did not qualify as
free, nor for that matter as open source.) A year after Joy's speech, Sun
Microsystems vice president Marco Boerries was appearing on the same stage
spelling out the company's new licensing compromise in the case of OpenOffice,
an office-application suite designed specifically for the GNU/Linux operating
system.
={ Boerries, Marco +2 ;
   community source, license of Sun Microsystems ;
   Joy, Bill ;
   O'Reilly & Associates :
     Open Source Conferences
}

"I can spell it out in three letters," said Boerries. "GPL."

At the time, Boerries said his company's decision had little to do with
Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs. "What
basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted
different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of
community you want to attract," said Boerries. "With [OpenOffice], it was clear
we had the highest correlation with the GPL community."~{ Marco Boerries,
interview with author (July, 2000). }~ Alas, this victory was incomplete, since
OpenOffice recommends the use of non-free plug-ins.

Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and,
indirectly, the political genius of the man who played the largest role in
creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the GPL the
way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free
Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it works because of
Richard's philosophy of design."
={ Columbia University ;
   Moglen, Eben +35
}

A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman
back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private
affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during
Zimmerman's legal battles with the federal government, says he was honored by
the request.~{ For more information on Zimmerman's legal travails, read Steven
Levy's /{Crypto}/, p. 287-288. In the original book version of /{Free as in
Freedom}/, I reported that Moglen helped defend Zimmerman against the National
Security Agency. According to Levy's account, Zimmerman was investigated by the
U.S. Attorney's office and U.S. Customs, not the NSA. }~
={ Zimmerman, Phillip ;
   National Security Administration
}

"I told him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot
of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt."

Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best
chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies into the
legal realm. Moglen says Stallman's approach to legal code and his approach to
software code are largely the same. "I have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that
what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't
make much sense," Moglen says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process,
and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for
their client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove
uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to
draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over
the world. But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And
the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what
it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far."

As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen understands the
frustration of would-be allies. "Richard is a man who does not want to
compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental," Moglen says, "and he
does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful
ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people."

In addition to helping the Free Software Foundation, Moglen has provided legal
aid to other copyright defendants, such as Dmitry Sklyarov, and distributors of
the DVD decryption program deCSS.
={ Sklyarov, Dmitri +1 }

Sklyarov had written and released a program to break digital copy-protection on
Adobe e-Books, in Russia where there was no law against it, as an employee of a
Russian company. He was then arrested while visiting the US to give a
scientific paper about his work. Stallman eagerly participated in protests
condemning Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, and the Free Software Foundation
denounced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as "censorship of software," but
it could not intervene in favor of Sklyarov's program because that was
non-free. Thus, Moglen worked for Sklyarov's defense through the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. The FSF avoided involvement in the distribution of deCSS,
since that was illegal, but Stallman condemned the U.S. government for
prohibiting deCSS, and Moglen worked as direct counsel for the defendants.
={ Electronic Frontier Foundation }

Following the FSF's decision not to involve itself in those cases, Moglen has
learned to appreciate the value of Stallman's stubbornness. "There have been
times over the years where I've gone to Richard and said, 'We have to do this.
We have to do that. Here's the strategic situation. Here's the next move.
Here's what he have to do.' And Richard's response has always been, 'We don't
have to do anything.'Just wait. What needs doing will get done."

"And you know what?" Moglen adds. "Generally, he's been right."

Such comments disavow Stallman's own self-assessment: "I'm not good at playing
games," Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a
shrewd strategist. "I'm not good at looking ahead and anticipating what
somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation
[of ideas], to say 'Let's make the foundation as strong as we can make it.'"

The GPL's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the
best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU colleagues. While
Stallman was never the sole person in the world releasing free software, he
nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movement's
ethical framework. Whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable
working inside that framework is immaterial. The fact that they even have a
choice at all is Stallman's greatest legacy.

Discussing Stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature. Stallman, 48
at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract
from that legacy. Still, the momentum of the free software movement makes it
tempting to examine Stallman's life outside the day-to-day battles of the
software industry and within a more august, historical setting.

To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate about this.
"I've never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going
to be like," says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "I just said
'I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'"

There's no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated the very
people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions, had he been
willing to fight for their views instead of his own. It is also a testament to
his forthright, ethical nature that many of Stallman's erstwhile political
opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed. The
tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however,
leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's own
personality is no longer there to get in the way?

In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the "100 year" question.
Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked various
software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current time-frame
and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free
software movement 100 years in the future. From the current vantage point, it
is easy to see similarities between Stallman and past Americans who, while
somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical
importance in relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David
Thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of /{Civil Disobedience}/,
and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern
environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like William
Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. "The Great Commoner," leader of the populist movement,
enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into
historical insignificance.
={ Bryan, Willliam Jennings ;
   Muir, John ;
   On Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) ;
   Thoreau, Henry David ;
   Sierra Club
}

Although not the first person to view software as public property, Stallman is
guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the GPL. Given that
fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine Richard Stallman's legacy
outside the current time frame. Will the GPL still be something software
programmers use in the year 2102, or will it have long since fallen by the
wayside? Will the term "free-software" seem as politically quaint as "free
silver" does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later
political events?

Predicting the future is risky sport. Stallman refuses, saying that asking what
people will think in 100 years presumes we have no influence over it. The
question he prefers is, "What should we do to make a better future?" But most
people, when presented with the predictive question, seemed eager to bite.

"One hundred years from now, Richard and a couple of other people are going to
deserve more than a footnote," says Moglen. "They're going to be viewed as the
main line of the story."

The "couple of other people" Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters
include John Gilmore, who beyond contributing in various ways to free software
has founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a.
Ted Nelson, author of the 1982book, /{Literary Machines}/. Moglen says
Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically significant,
non-overlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly considered to have coined the
term "hypertext," for identifying the predicament of information ownership in
the digital age. Gilmore and Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for
identifying the negative political effects of information control and building
organizations - the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and
the Free Software Foundation in the case of Stallman - to counteract those
effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman's activities as more
personal and less political in nature.
={ Electronic Frontier Foundation ;
   Gilmore, John ;
   Nelson, Theodor Holm +2 ;
   Nelson, Ted +2
}

"Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of un-free software were
particularly clear to him at an early moment," says Moglen. "This has a lot to
do with Richard's personality, which lots of people will, when writing about
him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in Richard Stallman's
own life work."

Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the
irascible Stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless seconds the
Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore:

_1 My guess is that Stallman's writings will stand up as well as Thomas
Jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his
principles... Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson will depend
on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up more important a
hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call "software" or
"technically imposed restrictions."
={ Jefferson, Thomas }

Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore writes, is
the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the GNU Project.
Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard
within the software-development industry. All told, Gilmore says, this
collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential
than the GNU Project, the GPL License, or any particular software program
developed by Stallman:

_1 Before the Internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on
software, even among teams that know and trust each other. Richard pioneered
collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers
who seldom meet each other. Richard didn't build any of the basic tools for
doing this (the TCP protocol, email lists, diff and patch, tar files, RCS or
CVS or remote-CVS), but he used the ones that were available to form social
groups of programmers who could effectively collaborate.

Stallman thinks that evaluation, though positive, misses the point. "It
emphasizes development methods over freedom, which reflects the values of open
source rather than free software. If that is how future users look back on the
GNU Project, I fear it will lead to a world in which developers maintain users
in bondage, and let them aid development occasionally as a reward, but never
take the chains off them."

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book, /{The
Future of Ideas}/, is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars, Lessig sees
the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called "digital commons," the vast
agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and
telecommunication standards that have triggered the Internet's exponential
growth over the last three decades. Rather than connect Stallman with other
Internet pioneers, men such as Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R.
Licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale,
Lessig sees Stallman's impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately,
unique:
={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) }

_1 [Stallman] changed the debate from "is" to "ought." He made people see how
much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward... That
said, I don't quite know how to place him in the context of Cerf or Licklider.
The innovation is different. It is not just about a certain kind of code, or
enabling the Internet. [It's] much more about getting people to see the value
in a certain kind of Internet. I don't think there is anyone else in that
class, before or after.

Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric
Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman's leadership role
has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when looking into
the 2102 crystal ball:

_1 I think Stallman's artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as revolutionary
works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I think history will be
less kind to some of the theories from which RMS operated, and not kind at all
to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior.

As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals:

_1 What history says about the GNU Project, twenty years from now, will depend
on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. If we lose, we will
be just a footnote. If we win, it is uncertain whether people will know the
role of the GNU operating system - if they think the system is "Linux," they
will build a false picture of what happened and why.

_1 But even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now is
likely to depend on who dominates politically.

Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons the
figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side
of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other.

John Brown's slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent trial he
effectively roused national demand for abolition. During the Civil War, John
Brown was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the 1900s, history textbooks
taught that he was crazy. During the era of legal segregation, while bigotry
was shameless, the U.S. partly accepted the story that the South wanted to tell
about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War
and related events.

Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of
Stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. It's
hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to the same level of infamy as
Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction period. Stallman, despite his
occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence. Still, it
is easy to envision a future in which Stallman's ideas wind up on the
ash-heap.~{ RMS: Sam Williams' further words here, "In fashioning the free
software cause not not as a mass movement but as a collection of private
battles against the forces of proprietary temptation," do not fit the facts.
Ever since the first announcement of the GNU Project, I have asked the public
to support the cause. The free software movement aims to be a mass movement,
and the only question is whether it has enough supporters to qualify as "mass."
As of 2009, the Free Software Foundation has some 3000 members that pay the
hefty dues, and over 20,000 subscribers to its monthly e-mail newsletter. }~

Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be Stallman's
greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns
those who mistake the Stallman personality as counter-productive or
epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of Stallman's life. Without that personality,
Moglen says, there would be precious few artifacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a
former Supreme Court clerk:

_1 Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what
made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his
possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a
comparison, because they could not be more different: Thurgood Marshall was a
man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed
it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of
a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now
most compare him to in that sense - of a piece, compact, made of the substance
that makes stars, all the way through - is Stallman.
={ Marshall, Thurgood }

In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in
the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the
business media, and a half dozen issues related to free software were swimming
through the news. Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each
begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and
feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour,
he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening
the GPL.
={ VA Linux }

"We were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about some
problems in Eastern Europe and what we were going to do when the problem of the
ownership of content began to threaten free software," Moglen recalls. "As we
were talking, I briefly thought about how we must have looked to people passing
by. Here we are, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the
next steps. And, of course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and
dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in
on our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the
revolution's right here at this table. This is what's making it happen. And
this man is the person making it happen."

Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental
simplicity of the Stallman style.

"It was funny," recalls Moglen. "I said to him, 'Richard, you know, you and I
are the two guys who didn't make any money out of this revolution.' And then I
paid for the lunch, because I knew he didn't have the money to pay for it."~{
RMS: I never refuse to let people treat me to a meal, since my pride is not
based on picking up the check. But I surely did have the money to pay for
lunch. My income, which comes from around half the speeches I give, is much
less than a law professor's salary, but I'm not poor. }~

1~ Epilogue from Sam Williams: Crushing Loneliness

[RMS: Because this chapter is so personally from Sam Williams, I have indicated
all changes to the text with square brackets or ellipses, and I have made such
changes only to clear up technical or legal points,and to remove passages that
I found to be hostile and devoid of information. I have also added notes
labeled 'RMS:' to respond to certain points. Williams has also changed the text
of this chapter; changes made by Williams are not explicitly indicated.]

Writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. The
drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage.

In /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse
of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers
the book's epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance
reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and"spy" by the Nation of Islam
spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get
Malcolm X's life story on paper.
={ Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Haley) +1 ;
   Haley, Alex
}

While I hesitate to compare this book with /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/,
I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12
months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a
biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable.
[RMS: I have built my career on saying no to things others accept without much
question, but if I sometimes seem or am disagreeable, it is not through
specific intention.] From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with
a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know
how this book came to be.

The story behind this story starts in an Oakland apartment, winding its way
through the various locales mentioned in the book - Silicon Valley, Maui,
Boston, and Cambridge. Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: New
York, New York, the book-publishing capital of the world, and Sebastopol,
California, the book-publishing capital of Sonoma County.

The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the
ill-fated web site BeOpen.com. One of my first assignments was a phone
interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that
Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org), the popular "news for nerds" site owned by
VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA LinuxSystems and before that, VA Research), gave
it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers
at BeOpen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site.
={ BeOpen.com +3 ;
   VA Linux ;
   VA Research ;
   VA Software, Inc. ;
   Slashdot
}

For all intents and purposes, the story should have ended there. Three months
after the interview, while attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in
Monterey, California, I received the following email message from Tracy
Pattison, foreign-rights manager at a large New York publishing house:
={ Monterey (California) ;
   O'Reilly & Associates :
     Open Source Conferences ;
   Pattison, Tracy
}

% poem or group what follows ?

poem{

To: sam@BeOpen.com

Subject: RMS Interview Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 - 0400

Dear Mr. Williams,

I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen
with great interest. I've been intrigued by RMS and his
work for some time now and was delighted to find your
piece which I really think you did a great job of capturing
some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying to do with
GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation.

What I'd love to do, however, is read more - and I don't
think I'm alone. Do you think there is more information
and/or sources out there to expand and update your
interview and adapt it into more of a profile of Stallman?
Perhaps including some more anecdotal information about
his personality and background that might really interest
and enlighten readers outside the more hardcore
programming scene?

}poem

Tracy ended the email with a request that I give her a call to discuss the idea
further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new
electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter
audience. The e-book format was 30,000words, about 100 pages, and she had
pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker
community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for
interesting people to profile,she had come across my BeOpen interview with
Stallman. Hence her email to me.

That's when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview into a
full-length feature profile?

My answer was instant: yes. Before accepting it, Tracy suggested I put together
a story proposal she could show her superiors. Two days later, I sent her a
polished proposal. A week later, Tracy sent me a follow up email. Her bosses
had given it the green light.

I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project was an
afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open source beat, I knew
Stallman was a stickler. I'd already received a half dozen emails at that point
upbraiding me for the use of "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux."

Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to
the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project to him that way, he
would be more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the copious amounts
of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations Stallman had left
lying around the Internet and do an unauthorized biography.

During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom - Or Copyright?"
Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000,edition of the MIT
/{Technology Review}/, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software
sins. Not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read
them, Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying
were overly harsh. Instead of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file,
readers downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant
purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any
attempt to open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a
criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law
designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar penalties
held for readers who converted a book's content into an open file format, even
if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their
home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy,
or resell an e-book. They only had the right to read it on an authorized
machine, warned Stallman:
={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act }

_1 We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books.But if e-books
replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic
ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed
piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine:no more used
book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from
the public library - no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read
without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more
anonymous purchasing of books either.)This is the world publishers have in mind
for us.~{ See "Freedom - Or Copyright?" (May, 2000), \\
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stallman0500.asp. }~

Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had
discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of
copyright [license] that would govern the e-book's usage. I mentioned the
/{Technology Review}/ article and asked if she could give me information on her
company's e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me.

Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the book
idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern.
"Did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked.

When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from
the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to lend support
to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn't want
to come off as lending support. "I don't want to participate in anything that
makes me look like a hypocrite," he said.

For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. He said
he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party
vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright
that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book's
content. Stallman pointed to Stephen King's /{The Plant}/ as a possible model.
In June, 2000, King announced on his official web site that he was
self-publishing /{The Plant}/ in serial form. According to the announcement,
the book's total cost would be $13, spread out over a series of $1
installments. As long as at least 75% of the readers paid for each chapter,
King promised to continue releasing new installments. By August, the plan
seemed to be working, as King had published the first two chapters with a third
on the way.
={ King, Stephen ;
   open source +4 ;
   Plant, The (King)
}

"I'd be willing to accept something like that," Stallman said. "As long as it
also permitted verbatim copying." [RMS: As I recall, I also raised the issue of
encryption; the text two paragraphs further down confirms this. I would not
have agreed to publish the book in a way that /{required}/ a non-free program
to read it.]

I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I might be
able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up Stallman and set up the
first interview for the book. Stallman agreed to the interview without making a
second inquiry into the status issue. Shortly after the first interview, I
raced to set up a second interview (this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before
Stallman headed off on a 14-day vacation to Tahiti. [RMS: That was not a pure
vacation; I gave a speech there too.]
={ Kihei (Hawaii) }

It was during Stallman's vacation that the bad news came from Tracy. Her
company's legal department didn't want to adjust its [license] notice on the
e-books. Readers who wanted to make their books transferable would [first have
to crack the encryption code, to be able to convert the book to a free, public
format such as HTML. This would be illegal and they might face criminal
penalties.]

With two fresh interviews under my belt, I didn't see any way to write the book
without resorting to the new material. I quickly set up a trip to New York to
meet with my agent and with Tracy to see if there was a compromise solution.

When I flew to New York, I met my agent, Henning Guttman. It was our first
face-to-face meeting, and Henning seemed pessimistic about our chances of
forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. The large, established
publishing houses already viewed the e-book format with enough suspicion and
weren't in the mood to experiment with copyright language that made it easier
for readers to avoid payment. As an agent who specialized in technology books,
however,Henning was intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. I told him
about the two interviews I'd already gathered and the promise not to publish
the book in a way that made Stallman "look like a hypocrite." Agreeing that I
was in an ethical bind, Henning suggested we make that our negotiating point.
={ Guttman, Henning }

Barring that, Henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach.
The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that
honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The stick would be the risks
associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. Nine months before Dmitry
Sklyarov became an Internet /{cause célèbre}/, we knew it was only a matter of
time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also
knew that a major publishing house releasing an [encrypted] e-book on Richard
M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This E-Book" on the
cover.
={ Sklyarov, Dmitri }

After my meeting with Henning, I called Stallman. Hoping to make the carrot
more enticing, I discussed a number of potential compromises. What if the
publisher released the book's content under a[dual] license, something similar
to what Sun Microsystems had done with Open Office, the free software desktop
applications suite? The publisher could then release DRM-restricted~{ RMS:
Williams wrote "commercial" here, but that is a misnomer, since it means
"connected with business." All these versions would be commercial if a company
published them. }~ versions of the e-book under [its usual] format, taking
advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software,
while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing HTML
format.

Stallman told me he didn't mind the [dual-license] idea, but he did dislike the
idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version.
Besides, he said [on second thought, this case was different precisely because
he had] a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate.

[RMS: The question was whether it would be wrong for me to agree to the
restricted version. I can endorse the free version of Sun's Open Office,
because it is free software and much better than nothing,while at the same time
I reject the non-free version. There is no self- contradiction here, because
Sun didn't need or ask my approval for the non-free version; I was not
responsible for its existence. In this case, if I had said yes to the
non-freely-copyable version, the onus would fall on me.]

I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing I could
get out of Stallman was a concession [RMS: i.e., a further compromise] that the
e-book's [license] restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial
redistribution."

Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd promised
Stallman that the work would be [freely sharable]. I told Stallman I couldn't
agree to that statement [RMS: though it was true,since he had accepted my
conditions at the outset] but that I did view the book as unfinishable without
his cooperation. Seemingly satisfied,Stallman hung up with his usual sign-off
line: "Happy hacking."

Henning and I met with Tracy the next day. Tracy said her company was willing
to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would limit the
excerpts to 500 words. Henning informed her that this wouldn't be enough for me
to get around my ethical obligation to Stallman. Tracy mentioned her own
company's contractual obligation to online vendors such as Amazon.com. Even if
the company decided to open up its e-book content this one time, it faced the
risk of its partners calling it a breach of contract. Barring a change of heart
in the executive suite or on the part of Stallman, the decision was up tome. I
could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with Stallman, or
I could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the verbal agreement to do
the book.
={ Amazon.com }

Following the meeting, my agent and I relocated to a pub on Third Ave. I used
his cell phone to call Stallman, leaving a message when nobody answered.
Henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my thoughts. When he
returned, he was holding up the cell phone.

"It's Stallman," Henning said.

The conversation got off badly from the start. I relayed Tracy's comment about
the publisher's contractual obligations.

"So," Stallman said bluntly. "Why should I give a damn about their contractual
obligations?"

Because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its vendors
over a 30,000-word e-book is a tall order, I suggested. [RMS: His unstated
premise was that I couldn't possibly refuse this deal for mere principle.]

"Don't you see?" Stallman said. "That's exactly why I'm doing this. I want a
signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and business as
usual."

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

"So that's it? You're just going to screw me? You're just going to bend to
their will?"

[RMS: The quotations show that Williams' interpretation of this conversation
was totally wrong. He compares me to a predator, but I was only saying no to
the deal he was badgering me to accept.I had already made several compromises,
some described above; I just refused to compromise my principles entirely away.
I often do this; people who aren't satisfied say I "refused to compromise at
all, "but that is an exaggeration; \\ see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html. Then I feared he was going to
disregard the conditions he had previously agreed to, and publish the book with
DRM despite my refusal. What I smelled was not his "blood" but possible
betrayal.]

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

"You mean license," Stallman said curtly.

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

"Aw, why didn't you just fucking do what I told you to do!" he shouted. [RMS: I
think this quotation was garbled, both because using "fucking" as an adverb was
never part of my speech pattern, and because the words do not fit the
circumstances. The words he quotes are a rebuke to a disobedient subordinate. I
felt he had an ethical obligation, but he was not my subordinate, and I would
not have spoken to him as one. Using notes rather than a recorder, he could not
reliably retain the exact words.]

I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in
my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: "I don't care. What
they're doing is evil. I can't support evil. Goodbye." [RMS: It sounds like I
had concluded that he would never take no for an answer, and the only way to
end the conversation without accepting his proposition was to hang up on him.]

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

I was indeed shaking. The shaking wouldn't stop until the Guinness was more
than halfway gone. It felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary
of "evil." [RMS: My words as quoted criticize the publisher, not Williams
personally. If he took it personally, perhaps that indicates he was starting to
take ethical responsibility for the deal he had pressed me to accept.] It felt
weirder still, knowing that three months before, I was sitting in an Oakland
apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. Now, I was sitting in a
part of the world I'd only known through rock songs, taking meetings with
publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent I'd never even laid eyes
on until the day before. It was all too surreal, like watching my life
reflected back as a movie montage.

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

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

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

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

When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and
acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too
much ground to Stallman in the pre-interview negotiation. [RMS: Those who have
read the whole book know that I would never have dropped the conditions.] A
former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman's "hypocrite" comment and
just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman's media-savviness
ex-pressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call.

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

During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a
magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so,since the original
interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I
also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of
radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I'd only received
two emails from Stallman.Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of
"GNU/Linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine /{Upside Today}/. Aside
from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York
University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story
about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my
lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose.
={ Upside Today web magazine }

In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from
Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of
Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a
biography. [RMS: I have a vague memory that I suggested contacting O'Reilly,
but I can't be sure after all these years.] The news pleased me. Of all the
publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had published
Eric Raymond's /{The Cathedral and the Bazaar}/, seemed the most sensitive to
the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied
heavily on the O'Reilly book /{Open Sources}/ as a historical reference. I also
knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by
Stallman, had been published with [license] notices that permitted
redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic
publication ever came up again.
={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) ;
   O'Reilly & Associates ;
   Open Sources (DiBona, et al) +2 ;
   Raymond, Eric
}

Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O'Reilly
intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari
Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve
special restrictions,~{ See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement:
Terms of Service" \\ http://my.safaribooksonline.com/termsofservice. As of
December, 2009, the see-books require non-free reader software, so people
should refuse to use them. }~ Henning warned, but O'Reilly was willing to allow
for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share the book's text
regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two
licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License.
={ Open Publication License (OPL) +8 ;
   OPL (Open Publication License) +8 ;
   Safari Tech Books Online subscription service
}

I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication
License (OPL)~{ See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999),
\\ http://opencontent.org/openpub/. }~ gives readers the right to reproduce and
distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic,"
provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits
modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open
Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the
author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or
book-form derivatives without prior author approval.

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), meanwhile, permits the copying and
distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries
the same license.~{ See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.3"
(November, 2008), \\ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. }~
={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +1 ;
   GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +1
}

It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions.
Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict
certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject
modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require
certain forms of front - and back-cover information if a party other than the
copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work,
however.

In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU
Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About Them."~{ See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html. }~

On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License.
Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability
of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict
modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better
to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the
non-selected options popping up in modified versions of a document.

The importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of their
original purpose - namely, to give software-manual owners a chance to improve
their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest of the community.
Since my book wasn't a manual, I had little concern about the modification
clause in either license. My only concern was giving users the freedom to
exchange copies of the book or make copies of the content, the same freedom
they would have enjoyed if they purchased a hardcover book. Deeming either
license suitable for this purpose, I signed the O'Reilly contract when it came
to me.

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

My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com), the
legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During
the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration
of the project's [free] offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In
one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative
work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button,
the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its
conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M.
Stallman didn't have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological
possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?~{ Anybody willing to
"port" this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will
receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing
technology, \\ visit http://www.udanax.com. }~
={ Nelson, Ted ;
   O'Reilly & Associates :
     Open Source Conferences ;
   Project Xanadu ;
   Udanax
}

When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O'Reilly, gave me a choice be-tween the OPL
or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month
I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing
houses, Tracy's included,were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of
interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not as a form
of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have
survived?
={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +1 ;
   GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +1 ;
   Petrycki, Laurie
}

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

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

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

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

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

To be honest, I wasn't too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female
friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman's mother. "In
fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the
Takeda Award," Lippman told me at the time.~{ Alas, I didn't find out about the
Takeda Foundation's decision to award Stallman, along with Linus Torvalds and
Ken Sakamura, with its first-ever award for"Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement
for Social/Economic Well-Being" until after Stallman had made the trip to Japan
to accept the award. For more information about the award and its accompanying
$1 million prize, visit the Takeda site, \\ http://www.takeda-foundation.jp. }~
={ Takeda Awards }

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

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

My wife immediately threw back the question: "What was the issue?" "Crushing
loneliness." During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of
the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened
Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to suggest they had.
Although more flirtatious than I remembered,Stallman retained the same general
level of prickliness. At one point,my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid"
only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke.

"I hate to break it to you, but there is no God," Stallman said.[RMS: I must
have been too deadpan. He could justly accuse me of being a wise guy, but not
of rebuking.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[RMS: Williams objectifies his reactions, both positive and negative, as parts
of me, but they are functions also of his own attitudes about appearance,
conformity, and business success.]

While I'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for
Stallman...I'm sure most will agree [that] few individuals offer as singular a
human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this
initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a
similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait.

Endnotes

1~ Appendix A - Hack, Hackers and Hacking
={ hackers +18 }

To understand the full meaning of the word "hacker," it helps to examine the
word's etymology over the years.

/{The New Hacker Dictionary}/, an online compendium of software-programmer
jargon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a
similar number for "hacker." Then again, the same publication also includes an
accompanying essay that quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers not
to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meaning,"
argues Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation."
Richard Stallman tries to articulate it with the phrase, "Playful cleverness."
={ Agre, Phil ;
   New Hacker Dictionary, The
}

Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers
trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled upas popular item of student
jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal
documenting the hacking phenomenon.According to the journal, students who
attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern
student might use the word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was
a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious - e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows
or defacing a campus statue - fell outside the bounds. Implicit within the
definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun.
={ MIT Museum }

This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s student
who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or dismantling
a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again, a modern speaker would
substitute the verb form of "goof" -"goofing" or "goofing off" - to describe
the same activity.

As the 1950s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more rebellious
edge. The MIT of the 1950s was overly competitive, and hacking emerged as both
a reaction to and extension of that competitive culture. Goofs and pranks
suddenly became a way to blow off steam, thumb one's nose at campus
administration, and indulge creative thinking and behavior stifled by the
Institute's rigorous undergraduate curriculum. With its myriad hallways and
underground steam tunnels, the Institute offered plenty of exploration
opportunities for the student undaunted by locked doors and "No
Trespassing"signs. Students began to refer to their off-limits explorations as
"tunnel hacking." Above ground, the campus phone system offered similar
opportunities. Through casual experimentation and due diligence, students
learned how to perform humorous tricks. Drawing inspiration from the more
traditional pursuit of tunnel hacking, students quickly dubbed this new
activity "phone hacking."

The combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration would
serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term. The first
self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a late
1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique within
the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee - the group behind the
railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated
assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local
cam-pus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in
commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding.
={ Tech Model Railroad Club ;
   S&P (Signals and Power) Committee +2 ;
   Signals and Power (S&P) Committee +2
}

The nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and maintaining this
system saw their activity as similar in spirit to phone hacking. Adopting the
hacking term, they began refining it even further. From the S&P hacker point of
view, using one less relay to operate a particular stretch of track meant
having one more relay for future play. Hacking subtly shifted from a synonym
for idle play to a synonym for idle play that improved the overall performance
or efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. Soon S&P
committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving and
reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the people who
did it as "hackers."

Given their affinity for sophisticated electronics - not to mention the
traditional MIT-student disregard for closed doors and "No Trespassing" signs -
it didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new machine on campus.
Dubbed the TX-0, the machine was one of the first commercially marketed
computers. By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse
over to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with
them.The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another
mutation in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking
circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to
"official" methods or software-writing procedures. It also meant improving the
efficiency and speed of already-existing pro-grams that tended to hog up
machine resources. True to the word's roots, it also meant writing programs
that served no other purpose than to amuse or entertain.
={ TX-0 computer }

A classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game Spacewar, the
first computer-based video game. Developed by MIT hackers in the early 1960s,
Spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions: it was goofy and random,
serving little useful purpose other than providing a nightly distraction for
the dozen or so hackers who delighted in playing it. From a software
perspective, however,it was a monumental testament to innovation of programming
skill.It was also completely free. Because hackers had built it for fun,they
saw no reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other
programmers. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar had become a diversion for
programmers around the world, if they had the (then rather rare) graphical
displays.

This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced
the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and phone
hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group
activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the
off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new
discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a
scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation.
Hackers and "official" computer scientists weren't always the best of allies,
but in the rapid evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer
evolved a cooperative - some might say symbiotic - relationship.

Hackers had little respect for bureaucrats' rules. They regarded computer
security systems that obstructed access to the machine as just another bug, to
be worked around or fixed if possible. Thus,breaking security (but not for
malicious purposes) was a recognized aspect of hacking in 1970, useful for
practical jokes (the victim might say, "I think someone's hacking me") as well
as for gaining access to the computer. But it was not central to the idea of
hacking. Where there was a security obstacle, hackers were proud to display
their wits in surmounting it; however, given the choice, as at the MIT AI
Lab,they chose to have no obstacle and do other kinds of hacking. Where there
is no security, nobody needs to break it.

It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that later
programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear the same hacker
mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term"hacker" had acquired elite
connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote
software code for the sake of writing software code. In the particular sense,
however, it was a testament to programming skill. Like the term "artist," the
meaning carried tribal overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as a hacker
was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense
personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker
appellation diminished as computers became more common.

As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional semantic
overtones. The hackers at the MIT AI Lab shared many other characteristics,
including love of Chinese food, disgust for tobacco smoke, and avoidance of
alcohol, tobacco and other addictive drugs. These characteristics became part
of some people's under-standing of what it meant to be a hacker, and the
community exerted an influence on newcomers even though it did not demand
conformity. However, these cultural associations disappeared with the AI Lab
hacker community. Today, most hackers resemble the surrounding society on these
points.

As the hackers at elite institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon
conversed about hacks they admired, they also considered the ethics of their
activity, and began to speak openly of a "hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten
rules that governed a hacker's day-to-day behavior. In the 1984 book
/{Hackers}/, author Steven Levy, after much research and consultation, codified
the hacker ethic as five core hacker tenets.
={ Hackers (Levy) +1 }

In the 1980s, computer use expanded greatly, and so did security breaking.
Mostly it was done by insiders with criminal intent, who were generally not
hackers at all. However, occasionally the police and administrators, who
defined disobedience as evil, traced a computer "intrusion" back to a hacker
whose idea of ethics was "Don't hurt people." Journalists published articles in
which "hacking" meant breaking security, and usually endorsed the
administrators' view of the matter. Although books like /{Hackers}/ did much to
document the original spirit of exploration that gave rise to the hacking
culture, for most newspaper reporters and readers the term "computer
hacker"became a synonym for "electronic burglar."

By the late 1980s, many U.S. teenagers had access to computers.Some were
alienated from society; inspired by journalists' distorted picture of
"hacking," they expressed their resentment by breaking computer security much
as other alienated teens might have done it by breaking windows. They began to
call themselves "hackers," but they never learned the MIT hackers' principle
against malicious behavior.As younger programmers began employing their
computer skills to harmful ends - creating and disseminating computer viruses,
breaking into computer systems for mischief, deliberately causing computers to
crash - the term "hacker" acquired a punk, nihilistic edge which attracted more
people with similar attitudes.

Hackers have railed against this perceived mis-usage of their self-designator
for nearly two decades. Stallman, not one to take things lying down, coined the
term "cracking" for "security breaking" so that people could more easily avoid
calling it "hacking." But the distinction between hacking and cracking is often
misunderstood. These two descriptive terms are not meant to be exclusive. It's
not that "Hacking is here, and cracking is there, and never the twain shall
meet." Hacking and cracking are different attributes of activities, just as
"young"and "tall" are different attributes of persons.

Most hacking does not involve security, so it is not cracking. Most cracking is
done for profit or malice and not in a playful spirit, so it is not hacking.
Once in a while a single act may qualify as cracking and as hacking, but that
is not the usual case. The hacker spirit includes irreverence for rules, but
most hacks do not break rules. Cracking is by definition disobedience, but it
is not necessarily malicious or harmful. The computer security field
distinguishes between "black hat"and "white hat" crackers - i.e., crackers who
turn toward destructive,malicious ends versus those who probe security in order
to fix it.

The hacker's central principle not to be malicious remains the primary cultural
link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the
1950s. It is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has
evolved over the last four decades,the original notion of hacking - i.e.,
performing pranks or exploring underground tunnels - remains intact. In the
fall of 2000, the MIT Museum paid tribute to the Institute's age-old hacking
tradition with a dedicated exhibit, the Hall of Hacks. The exhibit includes a
number of photographs dating back to the 1920s, including one involving amock
police cruiser. In 1993, students paid homage to the original MIT notion of
hacking by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the
Institute's main dome. The cruiser's vanity license plate read IHTFP, a popular
MIT acronym with many meanings. The most noteworthy version, itself dating back
to the pressure-filled world of MIT student life in the 1950s, is "I hate this
fucking place." In 1990,however, the Museum used the acronym as a basis for a
journal on the history of hacks. Titled /{The Journal of the Institute for
Hacks,Tomfoolery, and Pranks}/, it offers an adept summary of the hacking.
={ Hall of Hacks }

"In the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly valued as
it is in pure science," writes /{Boston Globe}/ reporter Randolph Ryan in a
1993 article attached to the police car exhibit. "A Hack differs from the
ordinary college prank in that the event usually requires careful planning,
engineering and finesse, and has an under-lying wit and inventiveness," Ryan
writes. "The unwritten rule holds that a hack should be good-natured,
non-destructive and safe. In fact,hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their
own handiwork."
={ Boston Globe ;
   Ryan, Randolph
}

The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical
boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks aspire
to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity,the software medium offers less
chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with
dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come.

Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become a
linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances.
Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. We cannot
predict how people will use the word in the future.We can, however, decide how
we will use it ourselves. Using the term "cracking" rather than "hacking," when
you mean "security breaking,"shows respect for Stallman and all the hackers
mentioned in this book,and helps preserve something which all computer users
have benefited from: the hacker spirit.
={ crackers }

1~ Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation License
={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +64 ;
   GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +64
}

Version 1.3, 3 November 2008

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation

http://fsf.org/

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license
document, but changing it is not allowed.

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the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being
considered responsible for modifications made by others.

This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the
document must themselves be free in the same sense.It complements the GNU
General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.

We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software,
because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with
manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is
not limited to software manuals;it can be used for any textual work, regardless
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provide you with an updated version of the Document.

2~ 4. MODIFICATIONS

You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the
conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified
Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the
role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the
Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do
these things in the Modified Version:

A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that
of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which should, if there
were any, be listed in the History section of the Document). You may use the
same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version
gives permission.

B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version,
together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of
its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from
this requirement.

C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified Version,
as the publisher.

D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.

E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the
other copyright notices.

F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving
the public permission to use the Modified Version under the terms of this
License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.

G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and
required Cover Texts given in the Document's license notice.

H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.

I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and add to it
an item stating at least the title, year, new authors,and publisher of the
Modified Version as given on the Title Page.If there is no section Entitled
"History" in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and
publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item
describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.

J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public
access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network
locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These
may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a network location for a
work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if
the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.

K. For any section Entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications",Preserve the
Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of
each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.


L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text
and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part
of the section titles.

M. Delete any section Entitled "Endorsements". Such a section may not be
included in the Modified Version.

N. Do not re-title any existing section to be Entitled "Endorsements"or to
conflict in title with any Invariant Section.

O. Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers.

If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or appendices that
qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material copied from the Document,
you may at your option designate some or all of these sections as invariant. To
do this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified
Version's license notice. These titles must be distinct from any other section
titles.

You may add a section Entitled "Endorsements", provided it contains nothing but
endorsements of your Modified Version by various parties-for example,
statements of peer review or that the text has been approved by an organization
as the authoritative definition of a standard.

You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage
of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts
in the Modified Version. Only one passage of Front-Cover Text and one of
Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through arrangements made by) any one
entity. If the Document already includes a cover text for the same cover,
previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you are
acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old one,
on explicit permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.

The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License give
permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or imply
endorsement of any Modified Version.

2~ 5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS

You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License,
under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that
you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the
original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your
combined work in its license notice, and that you preserve all their Warranty
Disclaimers.

The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple
identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy. If there are
multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but different contents, make the
title of each such section unique by adding at the end of it, in parentheses,
the name of the original author or publisher of that section if known, or else
a unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of
Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.

In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled "History" in the
various original documents, forming one section Entitled "History"; likewise
combine any sections Entitled "Acknowledgements", and any sections Entitled
"Dedications". You must delete all sections Entitled "Endorsements".

2~ 6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS

You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents
released under this License, and replace the individual copies of this License
in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection,
provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each
of the documents in all other respects.

You may extract a single document from such a collection, and distribute it
individually under this License, provided you insert a copy of this License
into the extracted document, and follow this License in all other respects
regarding verbatim copying of that document.

2~ 7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS

A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and
independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution
medium, is called an "aggregate" if the copyright resulting from the
compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation's users
beyond what the individual works permit.When the Document is included in an
aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate
which are not themselves derivative works of the Document.

If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the
Document, then if the Document is less than one half of the entire aggregate,
the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on covers that bracket the Document
within the aggregate, or the electronic equivalent of covers if the Document is
in electronic form.Otherwise they must appear on printed covers that bracket
the whole aggregate.

2~ 8. TRANSLATION

Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute
translations of the Document under the terms of section 4.Replacing Invariant
Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright
holders, but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in
addition to the original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include
a translation of this License,and all the license notices in the Document, and
any Warranty Disclaimers, provided that you also include the original English
version of this License and the original versions of those notices and
disclaimers.In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original
version of this License or a notice or disclaimer, the original version will
prevail.

If a section in the Document is Entitled "Acknowledgements","Dedications", or
"History", the requirement (section 4) to Preserve its Title (section 1) will
typically require changing the actual title.

2~ 9. TERMINATION

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as
expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify,
sublicense, or distribute it is void, and will automatically terminate your
rights under this License.

However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a
particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until
the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b)
permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by
some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.

Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated
permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some
reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation
of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the
violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.

Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses
of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If
your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, receipt of a
copy of some or all of the same material does not give you any rights to use
it.

2~ 10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free
Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in
spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems
or concerns. \\ See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.

Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the
Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License "or any
later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and
conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has
been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the
Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any
version ever published(not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the
Document specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of this
License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version
permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.

2~ 11. RELICENSING

"Massive Multi-author Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide
Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent
facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit
is an example of such a server. A"Massive Multi-author Collaboration" (or
"MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus
published on the MMC site.

"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license
published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a
principal place of business in San Francisco,California, as well as future
copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.

"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as
part of another Document.An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed
under this License, and if all works that were first published under this
License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole
or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2)
were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.

The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under
CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC
is eligible for relicensing.

2~ ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents

To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the
License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices
just after the title page:

_1 Copyright © YEAR YOUR NAME. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or
modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation
License".

If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts, replace
the "with ... Texts." line with this:

_1 with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES,with the Front-Cover
Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST.

If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination
of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation.

If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code,we recommend
releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software
license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free
software.

1~ Colophon

The front and back covers of this book were designed and produced by Rob Myers
using Inkscape, the free software vector graphics program. Jeanne Rasata also
contributed to the cover design.

The typsetting was done by John Sullivan at the Free Software Foundation using
LATEX, GNU Emacs, Evince, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The
primary font is 10-point Computer Modern.

Digital versions of the book, including the LATEX source code, are available at
http://www.fsf.org/faif. Improvements are welcome,and can be sent to
sales@gnu.org.