“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--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.[7] 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”.[8]
Stallman lets his menu drop a little when I bring this up. “Well, most men seem to want sex and seem to have a rather contemptuous attitude towards women”, he says. “Even women they’re involved with. I can’t understand it at all”.
I mention a passage from the 1999 book Open Sources in which Stallman confesses to wanting to name the ill-fated GNU kernel after a girlfriend at the time. The girlfriend’s name was Alix, a name that fit perfectly with the Unix developer convention of putting an “x” at the end of any new kernel name-e.g., “Linux”. Because the woman was a Unix system administrator, Stallman says it would have been an even more touching tribute. Unfortunately, Stallman notes, the kernel project’s eventual main developer renamed the kernel HURD.[9] Although Stallman and the girlfriend later broke up, the story triggers an automatic question: for all the media imagery depicting him as a wild-eyed fanatic, is Richard Stallman really just a hopeless romantic, a wandering Quixote tilting at corporate windmills in an effort to impress some as-yet-unidentified Dulcinea?
“I wasn’t really trying to be romantic”, Stallman says, recalling the Alix story. “It was more of a teasing thing. I mean, it was romantic, but it was also teasing, you know? It would have been a delightful surprise”.
For the first time all morning, Stallman smiles. I bring up the hand kissing. “Yes, I do do that”, Stallman says. “I’ve found it’s a way of offering some affection that a lot of women will enjoy. It’s a chance to give some affection and to be appreciated for it”.
Affection is a thread that runs clear through Richard Stallman’s life, and he is painfully candid about it when questions arise. “There really hasn’t been much affection in my life, except in my mind”, he says. Still, the discussion quickly grows awkward. After a few one-word replies, Stallman finally lifts up his menu, cutting off the inquiry.
“Would you like some shimai?” he asks.
When the food comes out, the conversation slaloms between the arriving courses. We discuss the oft-noted hacker affection for Chinese food, the weekly dinner runs into Boston’s Chinatown district during Stallman’s days as a staff programmer at the AI Lab, and the underlying logic of the Chinese language and its associated writing system. Each thrust on my part elicits a well-informed parry on Stallman’s part.
“I heard some people speaking Shanghainese the last time I was in China”, Stallman says. “It was interesting to hear. It sounded quite different [from Mandarin]. I had them tell me some cognate words in Mandarin and Shanghainese. In some cases you can see the resemblance, but one question I was wondering about was whether tones would be similar. They’re not. That’s interesting to me, because there’s a theory that the tones evolved from additional syllables that got lost and replaced. Their effect survives in the tone. If that’s true, and I’ve seen claims that that happened within historic times, the dialects must have diverged before the loss of these final syllables”.
The first dish, a plate of pan-fried turnip cakes, has arrived. Both Stallman and I take a moment to carve up the large rectangular cakes, which smell like boiled cabbage but taste like potato latkes fried in bacon.
I decide to bring up the outcast issue again, wondering if Stallman’s teenage years conditioned him to take unpopular stands, most notably his uphill battle since 1994 to get computer users and the media to replace the popular term “Linux” with “GNU/Linux”.
“I believe it did help me”, Stallman says, chewing on a dumpling. “I have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. I think the reason is that I was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there wasn’t anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads. It wouldn’t have made any difference. I’d still be just as rejected, so I didn’t try”.
Stallman points to his taste in music as a key example of his contrarian tendencies. As a teenager, when most of his high school classmates were listening to Motown and acid rock, Stallman preferred classical music. The memory leads to a rare humorous episode from Stallman’s middle-school years. Following the Beatles’ 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, most of Stallman’s classmates rushed out to purchase the latest Beatles albums and singles. Right then and there, Stallman says, he made a decision to boycott the Fab Four.
“I liked some of the pre-Beatles popular music”, Stallman says. “But I didn’t like the Beatles. I especially disliked the wild way people reacted to them. It was like: who was going to have a Beatles assembly to adulate the Beatles the most?”
When his Beatles boycott failed to take hold, Stallman looked for other ways to point out the herd-mentality of his peers. Stallman says he briefly considered putting together a rock band himself dedicated to satirizing the Liverpool group.
“I wanted to call it Tokyo Rose and the Japanese Beetles”.
Given his current love for international folk music, I ask Stallman if he had a similar affinity for Bob Dylan and the other folk musicians of the early 1960s. Stallman shakes his head. “I did like Peter, Paul and Mary”, he says. “That reminds me of a great filk”.
When I ask for a definition of “filk”, Stallman explains the concept. A filk, he says, is a popular song whose lyrics have been replaced with parody lyrics. The process of writing a filk is called filking, and it is a popular activity among hackers and science-fiction aficionados. Classic filks include “On Top of Spaghetti”, a rewrite of “On Top of Old Smokey”, and “Yoda”, filk-master “Weird” Al Yankovic’s Star Wars-oriented rendition of the Kinks tune, “Lola”.
Stallman asks me if I would be interested in hearing the folk filk. As soon as I say yes, Stallman’s voice begins singing in an unexpectedly clear tone:
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,If a woodchuck could chuck wood?How many poles could a polak lock,If a polak could lock poles?How many knees could a negro grow,If a negro could grow knees?The answer, my dear, is stick it in your ear.The answer is to stick it in your ear.
The singing ends, and Stallman’s lips curl into another child-like half smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.[10] 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.
7.
See Mae Ling Mak, “Mae Ling’s Story” (December 17, 1998).
http://www.crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998q4/003006.htm
So far, Mak is the only person I’ve found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although I’ve heard this from a few other female sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show.
http://www.linux.com/interact/potd.phtml?potd_id=44
8.
See Annalee Newitz, “If Code is Free Why Not Me?”
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/26/free_love/print.html
9.
See Richard Stallman, “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement”,
10.
For more Stallman filks, visit