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”.
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 code words 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?’”
Chapter 3. A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
Richard Stallman’s mother, Alice Lippman, still remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift.
“I think it was when he was eight”, Lippman recalls.
The year was 1961, and Lippman, a recently divorced single mother, was wiling away a weekend afternoon within the family’s tiny one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Leafing through a copy of Scientific American, Lippman came upon her favorite section, the Martin Gardner-authored column titled “Mathematical Games”. A substitute art teacher, Lippman always 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.
“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.’”[1]
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?’”
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.
“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.
1.
See Michael Gross, “Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius” (1999). This interview is one of the most candid Stallman interviews on the record. I recommend it highly.