“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 behavior.
Stallman’s Perl Conference outburst would momentarily chase off another potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use of the term “open source” and provide a definition for companies interested in making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.[6]
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 monomaniacal energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying New York Times article described the company as the product of a movement “known alternatively as free software and open source”.[7] Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computer was proclaiming the company’s adoption of the “open source” Apache server in the article headline.[8]
Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the “open source” term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as “open source”, was selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux-formerly VA Research-was floating its own IPO to historical effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company’s stock price exploded past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record.
Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who, as a company board member since the Mozilla launch, had received 150,000 shares of VA Linux stock. Stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting the Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36 million in potential wealth, Raymond penned a follow-up essay. In it, Raymond mused on the relationship between the hacker ethic and monetary wealth:
Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things-accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.[9]
Whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that Raymond and other open source proponents had simply been in it for the money, they drove home the open source community’s ultimate message: all you needed to sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a sensible message. Instead of fighting the marketplace head-on as Stallman had done, Raymond, Torvalds, and other new leaders of the hacker community had adopted a more relaxed approach-ignoring the marketplace in some areas, leveraging it in others. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process.
“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”.
Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as Raymond would not diminish Stallman’s role as a leader. If anything, it gave Stallman new followers to convert. Still, the Raymond territoriality charge is a damning one. There are numerous instances of Stallman sticking to his guns more out of habit than out of principle: his initial dismissal of the Linux kernel, for example, and his current unwillingness as a political figure to venture outside the realm of software issues.
Then again, as the recent debate over open source also shows, in instances when Stallman has stuck to his guns, he’s usually found a way to gain ground because of it. “One of Stallman’s primary character traits is the fact he doesn’t budge”, says Ian Murdock. “He’ll wait up to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that’s what it takes”.
Murdock, for one, finds that unbudgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software community. “You always know that he’s going to be consistent in his views”, Murdock says. “Most people aren’t like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect that”.
Chapter 12. A Brief Journey Through Hacker Hell
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.
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.
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. 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.
6.
See Bruce Perens et al., “The Open Source Definition”, The Open Source Initiative (1998).
7.
See Amy Harmon, “For Sale: Free Operating System”,
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html
8.
See John Markoff, “Apple Adopts `Open Source’ for its Server Computers”,
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html
9.
See Eric Raymond, “Surprised by Wealth”,
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-001-05-NW-LF