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 US partly accepted the story that the South wanted to tell about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War and related events.
Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of Stallman’s current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. Although it’s hard to see Stallman’s reputation falling to the level of infamy as Brown’s did during the post-Reconstruction period-Stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence-it’s easy to envision a future in which Stallman’s ideas wind up on the ash-heap. In fashioning the free software cause not as a mass movement but as a collection of private battles against the forces of proprietary temptation, Stallman seems to have created a unwinnable situation, especially for the many acolytes with the same stubborn will.
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 Stalllman’s life. Without that personality, Moglen says, there would be precious few artifiacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a former Supreme Court clerk:
Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different. Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, that the person I most now compare him to in that sense, all of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through, is Stallman.
In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen free software-related issues were swimming through the news. Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening the GPL.
“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.’”
Chapter 14. Epilogue: Crushing Loneliness
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.
While I hesitate to compare this book with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know how this book came to be.
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 BeOpen web site (http://www.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 Linux Systems 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.
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:
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