“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-a flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman’s eyes seemed to fixate on my wife’s chest-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.
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.
Stallman’s “pleasure” card, handed to me the night of our dinner.
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 more”, 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, 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.
While I’m sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman-indeed, after reading this book, some might feel zero affinity-I’m sure most will agree. 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.
Appendix A. Terminology
For the most part, I have chosen to use the term GNU/Linux in reference to the free software operating system and Linux when referring specifically to the kernel that drives the operating system. The most notable exception to this rule comes in Chapter 9. In the final part of that chapter, I describe the early evolution of Linux as an offshoot of Minix. It is safe to say that during the first two years of the project’s development, the operating system Torvalds and his colleagues were working on bore little similarity to the GNU system envisioned by Stallman, even though it gradually began to share key components, such as the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger.
This decision further benefits from the fact that, prior to 1993, Stallman saw little need to insist on credit.
Some might view the decision to use GNU/Linux for later versions of the same operating system as arbitrary. I would like to point out that it was in no way a prerequisite for gaining Stallman’s cooperation in the making of this book. I came to it of my own accord, partly because of the operating system’s modular nature and the community surrounding it, and partly because of the apolitical nature of the Linux name. Given that this is a biography of Richard Stallman, it seemed inappropriate to define the operating system in apolitical terms.
In the final phases of the book, when it became clear that O’Reilly & Associates would be the book’s publisher, Stallman did make it a condition that I use “GNU/Linux” instead of Linux if O’Reilly expected him to provide promotional support for the book after publication. When informed of this, I relayed my earlier decision and left it up to Stallman to judge whether the resulting book met this condition or not. At the time of this writing, I have no idea what Stallman’s judgment will be.
A similar situation surrounds the terms “free software” and “open source”. Again, I have opted for the more politically laden “free software” term when describing software programs that come with freely copyable and freely modifiable source code. Although more popular, I have chosen to use the term “open source” only when referring to groups and businesses that have championed its usage. But for a few instances, the terms are completely interchangeable, and in making this decision I have followed the advice of Christine Peterson, the person generally credited with coining the term. “The `free software’ term should still be used in circumstances where it works better”, Peterson writes. “[`Open source’] caught on mainly because a new term was greatly needed, not because it’s ideal”.
Appendix B. Hack, Hackers, and Hacking
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”.
Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled up as 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.