Such activities reflected a growing willingness on

Stallman's part to speak and act out in defense of

political beliefs. The AI Lab's spirit of direct action

had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to break

out of the timid impotence of his teenage years.

Breaking into an office to free a terminal wasn't the

same as taking part in a protest march, but it was

effective in ways that most protests weren't. It solved

the problem at hand.

By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was

beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons

of the AI Lab back at school.

"Did he tell you about the snake?" his mother asks at

one point during an interview. "He and his dorm mates

put a snake up for student election. Apparently it got

a considerable number of votes."

Stallman verifies the snake candidacy with a few

caveats. The snake was a candidate for election within

Currier House, Stallman's dorm, not the campus-wide

student council. Stallman does remember the snake

attracting a fairly significant number of votes, thanks

in large part to the fact that both the snake and its

owner both shared the same last name. "People may have

voted for it, because they thought they were voting for

the owner," Stallman says. "Campaign posters said that

the snake was `slithering for' the office. We also said

it was an `at large' candidate, since it had climbed

into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks

before and nobody knew where it was."

Running a snake for dorm council was just one of

several election-related pranks. In a later election,

Stallman and his dorm mates nominated the house

master's son. "His platform was mandatory retirement at

age seven," Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in

comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT

campus, however. One of the most successful

fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which

actually managed to outdraw most of the human

candidates in a campus-wide election. "They never

announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they

treated those votes as spoiled ballots," Stallman

recalls. "But the large number of spoiled ballots in

that election suggested that Woodstock had actually

won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was

suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the

driver was working for the MIT administration."

Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock's

candidacy, "but I admired it."In an email shortly after this book went into its

final

edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration

from the Harvard campus as well. "In my first year of

Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read the story

of the first revolt against the Chin dynasty," he says.

"The story is not reliable history, but it was very

moving."

At the AI Lab, Stallman's political activities had a

sharper-edged tone. During the 1970s, hackers faced the

constant challenge of faculty members and

administrators pulling an end-run around ITS and its

hacker-friendly design. One of the first attempts came

in the mid-1970s, as more and more faculty members

began calling for a file security system to protect

research data. Most other computer labs had installed

such systems during late 1960s, but the AI Lab, through

the insistence of Stallman and other hackers, remained

a security-free zone.

For Stallman, the opposition to security was both

ethical and practical. On the ethical side, Stallman

pointed out that the entire art of hacking relied on

intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side,

he pointed to the internal structure of ITS being built

to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to

reverse that design required a major overhaul.

"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing

System decided that file protection was usually used by

a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone

else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want

anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so

they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The

result was, that whenever something in the system was

broken, you could always fix it."See Richard Stallman (1986).

Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI

Lab's machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT

Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however,

security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS

installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once

again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he

saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software

code that controlled the password system, Stallman

implanted a software command that sent out a message to

any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password.

If a user entered "starfish," for example, the message

came back something like: I see you chose the password

"starfish." I suggest that you switch to the password

"carriage return." It's much easier to type, and also

it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.See Steven

Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],

1984): 417. I have modified this quote, which Levy also

uses as an excerpt, to illustrate more directly how the

program might reveal the false security of the system.

Levy uses the placeholder "[such and such]."

Users who did enter "carriage return"-that is, users

who simply pressed the Enter or Return button, entering

a blank string instead of a unique password-left their

accounts accessible to the world at large. As scary as

that might have been for some users, it reinforced the

hacker notion that Institute computers, and even

Institute computer files, belonged to the public, not

private individuals. Stallman, speaking in an interview

for the 1984 book Hackers, proudly noted that one-fifth

of the LCS staff accepted this argument and employed

the blank-string password.See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],

1984): 417.

Stallman's null-string crusade would prove ultimately

futile. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab's machines

were sporting password-based security systems. Even so,

it represents a major milestone in terms of Stallman's

personal and political maturation. To the objective

observer familiar with Stallman's later career, it

offers a convenient inflection point between the timid

teenager afraid to speak out even on issues of

life-threatening importance and the adult activist who

would soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time

occupation.

In voicing his opposition to computer security,

Stallman drew on many of the forces that had shaped his

early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for

authority, and frustration over hidden procedures and

rules that rendered some people clueless outcasts. He

would also draw on the ethical concepts that would

shape his adult life: communal responsibility, trust,

and the hacker spirit of direct action. Expressed in

software-computing terms, the null string represents

the 1.0 version of the Richard Stallman political

worldview-incomplete in a few places but, for the most

part, fully mature.

Looking back, Stallman hesitates to impart too much

significance to an event so early in his hacking

career. "In that early stage there were a lot of people

who shared my feelings," he says. "The large number of

people who adopted the null string as their password

was a sign that many people agreed that it was the

proper thing to do. I was simply inclined to be an

activist about it."

Stallman does credit the AI Lab for awakening that

activist spirit, however. As a teenager, Stallman had

observed political events with little idea as to how a

single individual could do or say anything of

importance. As a young adult, Stallman was speaking out

on matters in which he felt supremely confident,

matters such as software design, communal

responsibility, and individual freedom. "I joined this

community which had a way of life which involved

respecting each other's freedom," he says. "It didn't

take me long to figure out that that was a good thing.

It took me longer to come to the conclusion that this

was a moral issue."

Hacking at the AI Lab wasn't the only activity helping

to boost Stallman's esteem. During the middle of his

sophomore year at Harvard, Stallman had joined up with

a dance troupe that specialized in folk dances . What

began as a simple attempt to meet women and expand his

social horizons soon expanded into yet another passion

alongside hacking. Dancing in front of audiences

dressed in the native garb of a Balkan peasant,

Stallman no longer felt like the awkward, uncoordinated

10-year-old whose attempts to play football had ended

in frustration. He felt confident, agile, and alive.

For a brief moment, he even felt a hint of emotional

connection. He soon found being in front of an audience

fun, and it wasn't long thereafter that he began

craving the performance side of dancing almost as much

as the social side.

Although the dancing and hacking did little to improve

Stallman's social standing, they helped him overcome

the feelings of weirdness that had clouded his

pre-Harvard life. Instead of lamenting his weird

nature, Stallman found ways to celebrate it. In 1977,

while attending a science-fiction convention, he came

across a woman selling custom-made buttons. Excited,

Stallman ordered a button with the words "Impeach God"

emblazoned on it.

For Stallman, the "Impeach God" message worked on many

levels. An atheist since early childhood, Stallman

first saw it as an attempt to set a "second front" in

the ongoing debate on religion. "Back then everybody

was arguing about God being dead or alive," Stallman

recalls. "`Impeach God' approached the subject of God

from a completely different viewpoint. If God was so

powerful as to create the world and yet do nothing to

correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to

worship such a God? Wouldn't it be better to put him on trial?"

At the same time, "Impeach God" was a satirical take on

America and the American political system. The

Watergate scandal of the 1970s affected Stallman

deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up mistrusting

authority. Now, as an adult, his mistrust had been

solidified by the culture of the AI Lab hacker

community. To the hackers, Watergate was merely a

Shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles

that made life such a hassle for those without

privilege. It was an outsized parable for what happened

when people traded liberty and openness for security

and convenience.

Buoyed by growing confidence, Stallman wore the button

proudly. People curious enough to ask him about it

received the same well-prepared spiel. "My name is

Jehovah," Stallman would say. "I have a special plan to

save the universe, but because of heavenly security

reasons I can't tell you what that plan is. You're just

going to have to put your faith in me, because I see

the picture and you don't. You know I'm good because I

told you so. If you don't believe me, I'll throw you on

my enemies list and throw you in a pit where Infernal

Revenue Service will audit your taxes for eternity."

Those who interpreted the spiel as a word-for-word

parody of the Watergate hearings only got half the

message. For Stallman, the other half of the message

was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be

hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned

about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Americans

seemed to have forgotten the first part of Acton's

truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out

the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman

felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire

system that trusted power in the first place.

"I figured why stop with the small fry," says Stallman,

recalling the button and its message. "If we went after

Nixon, why not going after Mr. Big. The way I see it,

any being that has power and abuses it deserves to have

that power taken away."

Small Puddle of Freedom

Ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in Richard

Stallman's presence, and you'll get the same

recollection: forget the long hair. Forget the quirky

demeanor. The first thing you notice is the gaze. One

look into Stallman's green eyes, and you know you're in

the presence of a true believer.

To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement.

Stallman's eyes don't just look at you; they look

through you. Even when your own eyes momentarily shift

away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman's eyes

remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your

head like twin photon beams.

Maybe that's why most writers, when describing

Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998

Salon.com article titled "The Saint of Free Software,"

Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as

"radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."See Andrew Leonard, "The

Saint of Free Software,"

Salon.com (August 1998).

http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html

A 1999 Wired magazine article describes the Stallman

beard as "Rasputin-like,"See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired

News

(March 5, 1999).

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html

while a London Guardian profile describes the Stallman

smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."See "Programmer on moral high

ground; Free software is

a moral issue for Richard Stallman believes in freedom

and free software." London Guardian (November 6, 1999).

These are just a small sampling of the religious

comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has

to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography-see

Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The

Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-writes "Richard Stallman is

the God of Free Software." Honorable mention goes to

Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of

Stallman in his book-see Larry Lessig, The Future of

Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270-likens Stallman to

Moses: . . . as with Moses, it was another leader,

Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into

the promised land by facilitating the development of

the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too,

Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within

the movement. He is [an] unforgiving, and hence for

many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect

of modern culture. I have deep respect for the

principle and commitment of this extraordinary

individual, though I also have great respect for those

who are courageous enough to question his thinking and

then sustain his wrath. In a final interview with

Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious

comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old

Testament prophent, and the reason is Old Testament

prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They

wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be

bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt."

Such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately

fall short. That's because they fail to take into

account the vulnerable side of the Stallman persona.

Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time,

and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What

appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or

hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing

as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain contact.

If, as Stallman himself has suspected from time to

time, his personality is the product of autism or

Asperger Syndrome, his eyes certainly confirm the

diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of

intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and

distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to

give up the ghost.

My own first encounter with the legendary Stallman gaze

dates back to the March, 1999, LinuxWorld Convention

and Expo in San Jose, California. Billed as a "coming

out party" for the Linux software community, the

convention also stands out as the event that

reintroduced Stallman to the technology media.

Determined to push for his proper share of credit,

Stallman used the event to instruct spectators and

reporters alike on the history of the GNU Project and

the project's overt political objectives.

As a reporter sent to cover the event, I received my

own Stallman tutorial during a press conference

announcing the release of GNOME 1.0, a free software

graphic user interface. Unwittingly, I push an entire

bank of hot buttons when I throw out my very first

question to Stallman himself: do you think GNOME's

maturity will affect the commercial popularity of the

Linux operating system?

"I ask that you please stop calling the operating

system Linux," Stallman responds, eyes immediately

zeroing in on mine. "The Linux kernel is just a small

part of the operating system. Many of the software

programs that make up the operating system you call

Linux were not developed by Linus Torvalds at all. They

were created by GNU Project volunteers, putting in

their own personal time so that users might have a free

operating system like the one we have today. To not

acknowledge the contribution of those programmers is

both impolite and a misrepresentation of history.

That's why I ask that when you refer to the operating

system, please call it by its proper name, GNU/Linux."

Taking the words down in my reporter's notebook, I

notice an eerie silence in the crowded room. When I

finally look up, I find Stallman's unblinking eyes

waiting for me. Timidly, a second reporter throws out a

question, making sure to use the term " GNU/Linux"

instead of Linux. Miguel de Icaza, leader of the GNOME

project, fields the question. It isn't until halfway

through de Icaza's answer, however, that Stallman's

eyes finally unlock from mine. As soon as they do, a

mild shiver rolls down my back. When Stallman starts

lecturing another reporter over a perceived error in

diction, I feel a guilty tinge of relief. At least he

isn't looking at me, I tell myself.

For Stallman, such face-to-face moments would serve

their purpose. By the end of the first LinuxWorld show,

most reporters know better than to use the term "Linux"

in his presence, and wired.com is running a story

comparing Stallman to a pre-Stalinist revolutionary

erased from the history books by hackers and

entrepreneurs eager to downplay the GNU Project's

overly political objectives.2 Other articles follow,

and while few reporters call the operating system

GNU/Linux in print, most are quick to credit Stallman

for launching the drive to build a free software

operating system 15 years before.

I won't meet Stallman again for another 17 months.

During the interim, Stallman will revisit Silicon

Valley once more for the August, 1999 LinuxWorld show.

Although not invited to speak, Stallman does managed to

deliver the event's best line. Accepting the show's

Linus Torvalds Award for Community Service-an award

named after Linux creator Linus Torvalds-on behalf of

the Free Software Foundation, Stallman wisecracks,

"Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software

Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to

the Rebel Alliance."

This time around, however, the comments fail to make

much of a media dent. Midway through the week, Red Hat,

Inc., a prominent GNU/Linux vendor, goes public. The

news merely confirms what many reporters such as myself

already suspect: "Linux" has become a Wall Street

buzzword, much like "e-commerce" and "dot-com" before

it. With the stock market approaching the Y2K rollover

like a hyperbola approaching its vertical asymptote,

all talk of free software or open source as a political

phenomenon falls by the wayside.

Maybe that's why, when LinuxWorld follows up its first

two shows with a third LinuxWorld show in August, 2000,

Stallman is conspicuously absent.

My second encounter with Stallman and his trademark

gaze comes shortly after that third LinuxWorld show.

Hearing that Stallman is going to be in Silicon Valley,

I set up a lunch interview in Palo Alto, California.

The meeting place seems ironic, not only because of the

recent no-show but also because of the overall

backdrop. Outside of Redmond, Washington, few cities

offer a more direct testament to the economic value of

proprietary software. Curious to see how Stallman, a

man who has spent the better part of his life railing

against our culture's predilection toward greed and

selfishness, is coping in a city where even

garage-sized bungalows run in the half-million-dollar

price range, I make the drive down from Oakland.

I follow the directions Stallman has given me, until I

reach the headquarters of Art.net, a nonprofit "virtual

artists collective." Located in a hedge-shrouded house

in the northern corner of the city, the Art.net

headquarters are refreshingly run-down. Suddenly, the

idea of Stallman lurking in the heart of Silicon Valley

doesn't seem so strange after all.

I find Stallman sitting in a darkened room, tapping

away on his gray laptop computer. He looks up as soon

as I enter the room, giving me a full blast of his

200-watt gaze. When he offers a soothing "Hello," I

offer a return greeting. Before the words come out,

however, his eyes have already shifted back to the

laptop screen.

"I'm just finishing an article on the spirit of

hacking," Stallman says, fingers still tapping. "Take a look."

I take a look. The room is dimly lit, and the text

appears as greenish-white letters on a black

background, a reversal of the color scheme used by most

desktop word-processing programs, so it takes my eyes a

moment to adjust. When they do, I find myself reading

Stallman's account of a recent meal at a Korean

restaurant. Before the meal, Stallman makes an

interesting discovery: the person setting the table has

left six chopsticks instead of the usual two in front

of Stallman's place setting. Where most restaurant

goers would have ignored the redundant pairs, Stallman

takes it as challenge: find a way to use all six

chopsticks at once. Like many software hacks, the

successful solution is both clever and silly at the

same time. Hence Stallman's decision to use it as an

illustration.

As I read the story, I feel Stallman watching me

intently. I look over to notice a proud but child-like

half smile on his face. When I praise the essay, my

comment barely merits a raised eyebrow.

"I'll be ready to go in a moment," he says.

Stallman goes back to tapping away at his laptop. The

laptop is gray and boxy, not like the sleek, modern

laptops that seemed to be a programmer favorite at the

recent LinuxWorld show. Above the keyboard rides a

smaller, lighter keyboard, a testament to Stallman's

aging hands. During the late 1980s, when Stallman was

putting in 70- and 80-hour work weeks writing the first

free software tools and programs for the GNU Project,

the pain in Stallman's hands became so unbearable that

he had to hire a typist. Today, Stallman relies on a

keyboard whose keys require less pressure than a

typical computer keyboard.

Stallman has a tendency to block out all external

stimuli while working. Watching his eyes lock onto the

screen and his fingers dance, one quickly gets the

sense of two old friends locked in deep conversation.

The session ends with a few loud keystrokes and the

slow disassembly of the laptop.

"Ready for lunch?" Stallman asks.

We walk to my car. Pleading a sore ankle, Stallman

limps along slowly. Stallman blames the injury on a

tendon in his left foot. The injury is three years old

and has gotten so bad that Stallman, a huge fan of folk

dancing, has been forced to give up all dancing

activities. "I love folk dancing inherently," Stallman

laments. "Not being able to dance has been a tragedy

for me."

Stallman's body bears witness to the tragedy. Lack of

exercise has left Stallman with swollen cheeks and a

pot belly that was much less visible the year before.

You can tell the weight gain has been dramatic, because

when Stallman walks, he arches his back like a pregnant

woman trying to accommodate an unfamiliar load.

The walk is further slowed by Stallman's willingness to

stop and smell the roses, literally. Spotting a

particularly beautiful blossom, he tickles the

innermost petals with his prodigious nose, takes a deep

sniff and steps back with a contented sigh.

"Mmm, rhinophytophilia,"At the time, I thought Stallman was referring to the

flower's scientific name. Months later, I would learn

that rhinophytophilia was in fact a humorous reference

to the activity, i.e., Stallman sticking his nose into

a flower and enjoying the moment. For another humorous

Stallman flower incident, visit:

http://www.stallman.org/texas.html

he says, rubbing his back.

The drive to the restaurant takes less than three

minutes. Upon recommendation from Tim Ney, former

executive director of the Free Software Foundation, I

have let Stallman choose the restaurant. While some

reporters zero in on Stallman's monk-like lifestyle,

the truth is, Stallman is a committed epicure when it

comes to food. One of the fringe benefits of being a

traveling missionary for the free software cause is the

ability to sample delicious food from around the world.

"Visit almost any major city in the world, and chances

are Richard knows the best restaurant in town," says

Ney. "Richard also takes great pride in knowing what's

on the menu and ordering for the entire table."

For today's meal, Stallman has chosen a Cantonese-style

dim sum restaurant two blocks off University Avenue,

Palo Alto's main drag. The choice is partially inspired

by Stallman's recent visit to China, including a

lecture stop in Guangdong province, in addition to

Stallman's personal aversion to spicier Hunanese and

Szechuan cuisine. "I'm not a big fan of spicy,"

Stallman admits.

We arrive a few minutes after 11 a.m. and find

ourselves already subject to a 20-minute wait. Given

the hacker aversion to lost time, I hold my breath

momentarily, fearing an outburst. Stallman, contrary to

expectations, takes the news in stride.

"It's too bad we couldn't have found somebody else to

join us," he tells me. "It's always more fun to eat

with a group of people."

During the wait, Stallman practices a few dance steps.

His moves are tentative but skilled. We discuss current

events. Stallman says his only regret about not

attending LinuxWorld was missing out on a press

conference announcing the launch of the GNOME

Foundation. Backed by Sun Microsystems and IBM, the

foundation is in many ways a vindication for Stallman,

who has long championed that free software and

free-market economics need not be mutually exclusive.

Nevertheless, Stallman remains dissatisfied by the

message that came out.

"The way it was presented, the companies were talking

about Linux with no mention of the GNU Project at all,"

Stallman says.

Such disappointments merely contrast the warm response

coming from overseas, especially Asia, Stallman notes.

A quick glance at the Stallman 2000 travel itinerary

bespeaks the growing popularity of the free software

message. Between recent visits to India, China, and

Brazil, Stallman has spent 12 of the last 115 days on

United States soil. His travels have given him an

opportunity to see how the free software concept

translates into different languages of cultures.

"In India many people are interested in free software,

because they see it as a way to build their computing

infrastructure without spending a lot of money,"

Stallman says. "In China, the concept has been much

slower to catch on. Comparing free software to free

speech is harder to do when you don't have any free

speech. Still, the level of interest in free software

during my last visit was profound."

The conversation shifts to Napster, the San Mateo,

California software company, which has become something

of a media cause cÈlËbre in recent months. The company

markets a controversial software tool that lets music

fans browse and copy the music files of other music

fans. Thanks to the magnifying powers of the Internet,

this so-called "peer-to-peer" program has evolved into

a de facto online juke box, giving ordinary music fans

a way to listen to MP3 music files over the computer

without paying a royalty or fee, much to record

companies' chagrin.

Although based on proprietary software, the Napster

system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman

contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in

other words, once making a copy is less a matter of

duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a

matter of duplicating information-the natural human

impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict.

Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster

execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse.

Giving music listeners a central place to trade music

files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer

the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.

The sudden success of the Napster model has put the

fear in traditional record companies, with good reason.

Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman,

U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a

request filed by the Recording Industry Association of

America for an injunction against the file-sharing

service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by

the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early

2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San

Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,5 a

decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later

proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative

content community and the legitimate online marketplace."See "A Clear Victory

for Recording Industry in Napster

Case," RIAA press release (February 12, 2001).

http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=372

For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business

model is scary in different ways. The company's

eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles

such as file sharing and communal information

ownership, while at the same time selling a service

based on proprietary software, sends a distressing

mixed message. As a person who already has a hard

enough time getting his own carefully articulated

message into the media stream, Stallman is

understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out

about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to

learning a thing or two from the social side of the

Napster phenomenon.

"Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to

privately redistribute works of entertainment,"

Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster

useful, however, tells me that the right to

redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor

basis, but to the public at large, is essential and

therefore may not be taken away."

No sooner does Stallman say this than the door to the

restaurant swings open and we are invited back inside

by the host. Within a few seconds, we are seated in a

side corner of the restaurant next to a large mirrored wall.

The restaurant's menu doubles as an order form, and

Stallman is quickly checking off boxes before the host

has even brought water to the table. "Deep-fried shrimp

roll wrapped in bean-curd skin," Stallman reads.

"Bean-curd skin. It offers such an interesting texture.

I think we should get it."

This comment leads to an impromptu discussion of

Chinese food and Stallman's recent visit to China. "The

food in China is utterly exquisite," Stallman says, his

voice gaining an edge of emotion for the first time

this morning. "So many different things that I've never

seen in the U.S., local things made from local

mushrooms and local vegetables. It got to the point

where I started keeping a journal just to keep track of

every wonderful meal."

The conversation segues into a discussion of Korean

cuisine. During the same June, 2000, Asian tour,

Stallman paid a visit to South Korea. His arrival

ignited a mini-firestorm in the local media thanks to a

Korean software conference attended by Microsoft

founder and chairman Bill Gates that same week. Next to

getting his photo above Gates's photo on the front page

of the top Seoul newspaper, Stallman says the best

thing about the trip was the food. "I had a bowl of

naeng myun, which is cold noodles," says Stallman.

"These were a very interesting feeling noodle. Most

places don't use quite the same kind of noodles for

your naeng myun, so I can say with complete certainty

that this was the most exquisite naeng myun I ever had."

The term "exquisite" is high praise coming from

Stallman. I know this, because a few moments after

listening to Stallman rhapsodize about naeng myun, I

feel his laser-beam eyes singeing the top of my right shoulder.

"There is the most exquisite woman sitting just behind

you," Stallman says.

I turn to look, catching a glimpse of a woman's back.

The woman is young, somewhere in her mid-20s, and is

wearing a white sequinned dress. She and her male lunch

companion are in the final stages of paying the check.

When both get up from the table to leave the

restaurant, I can tell without looking, because

Stallman's eyes suddenly dim in intensity.

"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-ý-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.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

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."See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?"

Salon.com (May 26, 2000).

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.See Richard Stallman,

"The GNU Operating System and the

Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly &

Associates, Inc., 1999): 65.

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.For more Stallman

filks, visit

http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html. To hear Stallman

singing "The Free Software Song," visit

http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html.

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.

"It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to

another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with

software programs. "The right approach is to look at

each type of work and see what conclusion you get."

When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he

divides the world into three categories. The first

category involves "functional" works-e.g., software

programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second

category involves works that might best be described as

"testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical

documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be

undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free

to modify the work at will. The final category involves

works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals,

and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be

to alter a person's recollections or point of

view-action Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable.

Of the three categories, the first should give users

the unlimited right to make modified versions, while

the second and third should regulate that right

according to the will of the original author.

Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy

and redistribute noncommercially should remain

unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that

means giving Internet users the right to generate a

hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and

then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it.

"It's clear that private occasional redistribution must

be permitted, because only a police state can stop

that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between

people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that

we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial

redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because

so many people want to do that and find it so useful."

When I ask whether the courts would accept such a

permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.

"That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now

you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics

to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally

different questions in the same field. It's useless to

jump from one to the other. How the courts would

interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way,

because that's the way these laws have been bought by

publishers."

The comment provides an insight into Stallman's

political philosophy: just because the legal system

currently backs up businesses' ability to treat

copyright as the software equivalent of land title

doesn't mean computer users have to play the game

according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue,

not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the

existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman

says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm

thinking about what should the law do? I consider the

law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend

the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."

The invocation of Jim Crow prompts another question.

How much influence or inspiration does Stallman draw

from past political leaders? Like the civil-rights

movement of the 1950s and 1960s, his attempt to drive

social change is based on an appeal to timeless values:

freedom, justice, and fair play.

Stallman divides his attention between my analogy and a

particularly tangled strand of hair. When I stretch the

analogy to the point where I'm comparing Stallman with

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stallman, after breaking

off a split end and popping it into his mouth, cuts me off.

"I'm not in his league, but I do play the same game,"

he says, chewing.

I suggest Malcolm X as another point of comparison.

Like the former Nation of Islam spokesperson, Stallman

has built up a reputation for courting controversy,

alienating potential allies, and preaching a message

favoring self-sufficiency over cultural integration.

Chewing on another split end, Stallman rejects the

comparison. "My message is closer to King's message,"

he says. "It's a universal message. It's a message of

firm condemnation of certain practices that mistreat

others. It's not a message of hatred for anyone. And

it's not aimed at a narrow group of people. I invite

anyone to value freedom and to have freedom."

Even so, a suspicious attitude toward political

alliances remains a fundamental Stallman character

trait. In the case of his well-publicized distaste for

the term "open source," the unwillingness to

participate in recent coalition-building projects seems

understandable. As a man who has spent the last two

decades stumping on the behalf of free software,

Stallman's political capital is deeply invested in the

term. Still, comments such as the "Han Solo" wisecrack

at the 1999 LinuxWorld have only reinforced the

Stallman's reputation in the software industry as a

disgrunted mossback unwilling to roll with political or

marketing trends.

"I admire and respect Richard for all the work he's

done," says Red Hat president Robert Young, summing up

Stallman's paradoxical political nature. "My only

critique is that sometimes Richard treats his friends

worse than his enemies."

Stallman's unwillingness to seek alliances seems

equally perplexing when you consider his political

interests outside of the free software movement. Visit

Stallman's offices at MIT, and you instantly find a

clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering

civil-rights abuses around the globe. Visit his web

site, and you'll find diatribes on the Digital

Millennium Copyright Act, the War on Drugs, and the

World Trade Organization.

Given his activist tendencies, I ask, why hasn't

Stallman sought a larger voice? Why hasn't he used his

visibility in the hacker world as a platform to boost

rather than reduce his political voice.

Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates

the question for a moment.

"I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little

puddle of freedom," he says. "Because the more

well-known and conventional areas of working for

freedom and a better society are tremendously

important. I wouldn't say that free software is as

important as they are. It's the responsibility I

undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way

I could do something about it. But, for example, to end

police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the

kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a

comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who

do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are

tremendously important issues, far more important than

what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them."

Once again, Stallman presents his political activity as

a function of personal confidence. Given the amount of

time it has taken him to develop and hone the free

software movement's core tenets, Stallman is hesitant

to jump aboard any issues or trends that might

transport him into uncharted territory.

"I wish I knew I how to make a major difference on

those bigger issues, because I would be tremendously

proud if I could, but they're very hard and lots of

people who are probably better than I am have been

working on them and have gotten only so far," he says.

"But as I see it, while other people were defending

against these big visible threats, I saw another threat

that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against

that threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was

the only one there."

Chewing a final split end, Stallman suggests paying the

check. Before the waiter can take it away, however,

Stallman pulls out a white-colored dollar bill and

throws it on the pile. The bill looks so clearly

counterfeit, I can't help but pick it up and read it.

Sure enough, it is counterfeit. Instead of bearing the

image of a George Washington or Abe Lincoln, the bill's

front side bears the image of a cartoon pig. Instead of

the United States of America, the banner above the pig

reads "United Swines of Avarice." The bill is for zero

dollars, and when the waiter picks up the money,

Stallman makes sure to tug on his sleeve.

"I added an extra zero to your tip," Stallman says, yet

another half smile creeping across his lips.

The waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of

the bill, smiles and scurries away.

"I think that means we're free to go," Stallman says.

The Emacs Commune

The AI Lab of the 1970s was by all accounts a special

place. Cutting-edge projects and top-flight researchers

gave it an esteemed position in the world of computer

science. The internal hacker culture and its anarchic

policies lent a rebellious mystique as well. Only

later, when many of the lab's scientists and software

superstars had departed, would hackers fully realize

the unique and ephemeral world they had once inhabited.

"It was a bit like the Garden of Eden," says Stallman,

summing up the lab and its software-sharing ethos in a

1998 Forbes article. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate."See Josh

McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes

(August 10, 1998).

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0810/6203094a.html

Such mythological descriptions, while extreme,

underline an important fact. The ninth floor of 545

Tech Square was more than a workplace for many. For

hackers such as Stallman, it was home.

The word "home" is a weighted term in the Stallman

lexicon. In a pointed swipe at his parents, Stallman,

to this day, refuses to acknowledge any home before

Currier House, the dorm he lived in during his days at

Harvard. He has also been known to describe leaving

that home in tragicomic terms. Once, while describing

his years at Harvard, Stallman said his only regret was

getting kicked out. It wasn't until I asked Stallman

what precipitated his ouster, that I realized I had

walked into a classic Stallman setup line.

"At Harvard they have this policy where if you pass too

many classes they ask you to leave," Stallman says.

With no dorm and no desire to return to New York,

Stallman followed a path blazed by Greenblatt, Gosper,

Sussman, and the many other hackers before him.

Enrolling at MIT as a grad student, Stallman rented an

apartment in nearby Cambridge but soon viewed the AI

Lab itself as his de facto home. In a 1986 speech,

Stallman recalled his memories of the AI Lab during

this period: I may have done a little bit more living

at the lab than most people, because every year or two

for some reason or other I'd have no apartment and I

would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've

always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and

cool in the summer. But it was not at all uncommon to

find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of

their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly

can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And

then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over

to the nearest soft horizontal surface. A very informal

atmosphere.See Stallman (1986). The lab's home-like atmosphere could be a

problem at times. What some saw as a dorm, others

viewed as an electronic opium den. In the 1976 book

Computer Power and Human Reason, MIT researcher Joseph

Weizenbaum offered a withering critique of the "

computer bum," Weizenbaum's term for the hackers who

populated computer rooms such as the AI Lab. "Their

rumpled clothes, their unwashed hair and unshaved

faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they

are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which

they move," Weizenbaum wrote. "[Computer bums] exist,

at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers."See Joseph

Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason:

From Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman, 1976): 116.

Almost a quarter century after its publication,

Stallman still bristles when hearing Weizenbaum's

"computer bum" description, discussing it in the

present tense as if Weizenbaum himself was still in the

room. "He wants people to be just professionals, doing

it for the money and wanting to get away from it and

forget about it as soon as possible," Stallman says.

"What he sees as a normal state of affairs, I see as a tragedy."

Hacker life, however, was not without tragedy. Stallman

characterizes his transition from weekend hacker to

full-time AI Lab denizen as a series of painful

misfortunes that could only be eased through the

euphoria of hacking. As Stallman himself has said, the

first misfortune was his graduation from Harvard. Eager

to continue his studies in physics, Stallman enrolled

as a graduate student at MIT. The choice of schools was

a natural one. Not only did it give Stallman the chance

to follow the footsteps of great MIT alumni: William

Shockley ('36), Richard P. Feynman ('39), and Murray

Gell-Mann ('51), it also put him two miles closer to

the AI Lab and its new PDP-10 computer. "My attention

was going toward programming, but I still thought,

well, maybe I can do both," Stallman says.

Toiling in the fields of graduate-level science by day

and programming in the monastic confines of the AI Lab

by night, Stallman tried to achieve a perfect balance.

The fulcrum of this geek teeter-totter was his weekly

outing with the folk-dance troupe, his one social

outlet that guaranteed at least a modicum of

interaction with the opposite sex. Near the end of that

first year at MIT, however, disaster struck. A knee

injury forced Stallman to drop out of the troupe. At

first, Stallman viewed the injury as a temporary

problem, devoting the spare time he would have spent

dancing to working at the AI Lab even more. By the end

of the summer, when the knee still ached and classes

reconvened, Stallman began to worry. "My knee wasn't

getting any better," Stallman recalls, "which meant I

had to stop dancing completely. I was heartbroken."

With no dorm and no dancing, Stallman's social universe

imploded. Like an astronaut experiencing the

aftereffects of zero-gravity, Stallman found that his

ability to interact with nonhackers, especially female

nonhackers, had atrophied significantly. After 16 weeks

in the AI Lab, the self confidence he'd been quietly

accumulating during his 4 years at Harvard was

virtually gone.

"I felt basically that I'd lost all my energy,"

Stallman recalls. "I'd lost my energy to do anything

but what was most immediately tempting. The energy to

do something else was gone. I was in total despair."

Stallman retreated from the world even further,

focusing entirely on his work at the AI Lab. By

October, 1975, he dropped out of MIT, never to go back.

Software hacking, once a hobby, had become his calling.

Looking back on that period, Stallman sees the

transition from full-time student to full-time hacker

as inevitable. Sooner or later, he believes, the

siren's call of computer hacking would have overpowered

his interest in other professional pursuits. "With

physics and math, I could never figure out a way to

contribute," says Stallman, recalling his struggles

prior to the knee injury. "I would have been proud to

advance either one of those fields, but I could never

see a way to do that. I didn't know where to start.

With software, I saw right away how to write things

that would run and be useful. The pleasure of that

knowledge led me to want to do it more."

Stallman wasn't the first to equate hacking with

pleasure. Many of the hackers who staffed the AI Lab

boasted similar, incomplete academic rÈsumÈs. Most had

come in pursuing degrees in math or electrical

engineering only to surrender their academic careers

and professional ambitions to the sheer exhilaration

that came with solving problems never before addressed.

Like St. Thomas Aquinas, the scholastic known for

working so long on his theological summae that he

sometimes achieved spiritual visions, hackers reached

transcendent internal states through sheer mental focus

and physical exhaustion. Although Stallman shunned

drugs, like most hackers, he enjoyed the "high" that

came near the end of a 20-hour coding bender.

Perhaps the most enjoyable emotion, however, was the

sense of personal fulfillment. When it came to hacking,

Stallman was a natural. A childhood's worth of

late-night study sessions gave him the ability to work

long hours with little sleep. As a social outcast since

age 10, he had little difficulty working alone. And as

a mathematician with built-in gift for logic and

foresight, Stallman possessed the ability to circumvent

design barriers that left most hackers spinning their wheels.

"He was special," recalls Gerald Sussman, an MIT

faculty member and former AI Lab researcher. Describing

Stallman as a "clear thinker and a clear designer,"

Sussman employed Stallman as a research-project

assistant beginning in 1975. The project was complex,

involving the creation of an AI program that could

analyze circuit diagrams. Not only did it involve an

expert's command of Lisp, a programming language built

specifically for AI applications, but it also required

an understanding of how a human might approach the same task.

When he wasn't working on official projects such as

Sussman's automated circuit-analysis program, Stallman

devoted his time to pet projects. It was in a hacker's

best interest to improve the lab's software

infrastructure, and one of Stallman's biggest pet

projects during this period was the lab's editor

program TECO.

The story of Stallman's work on TECO during the 1970s

is inextricably linked with Stallman's later leadership

of the free software movement. It is also a significant

stage in the history of computer evolution, so much so

that a brief recapitulation of that evolution is

necessary. During the 1950s and 1960s, when computers

were first appearing at universities, computer

programming was an incredibly abstract pursuit. To

communicate with the machine, programmers created a

series of punch cards, with each card representing an

individual software command. Programmers would then

hand the cards over to a central system administrator

who would then insert them, one by one, into the

machine, waiting for the machine to spit out a new set

of punch cards, which the programmer would then

decipher as output. This process, known as " batch

processing," was cumbersome and time consuming. It was

also prone to abuses of authority. One of the

motivating factors behind hackers' inbred aversion to

centralization was the power held by early system

operators in dictating which jobs held top priority.

In 1962, computer scientists and hackers involved in

MIT's Project MAC, an early forerunner of the AI Lab,

took steps to alleviate this frustration. Time-sharing,

originally known as "time stealing," made it possible

for multiple programs to take advantage of a machine's

operational capabilities. Teletype interfaces also made

it possible to communicate with a machine not through a

series of punched holes but through actual text. A

programmer typed in commands and read the line-by-line

output generated by the machine.

During the late 1960s, interface design made additional

leaps. In a famous 1968 lecture, Doug Engelbart, a

scientist then working at the Stanford Research

Institute, unveiled a prototype of the modern graphical

interface. Rigging up a television set to the computer

and adding a pointer device which Engelbart dubbed a "

mouse," the scientist created a system even more

interactive than the time-sharing system developed a

MIT. Treating the video display like a high-speed

printer, Engelbart's system gave a user the ability to

move the cursor around the screen and see the cursor

position updated by the computer in real time. The user

suddenly had the ability to position text anywhere on

the screen.

Such innovations would take another two decades to make

their way into the commercial marketplace. Still, by

the 1970s, video screens had started to replace

teletypes as display terminals, creating the potential

for full-screen-as opposed to line-by-line-editing capabilities.

One of the first programs to take advantage of this

full-screen capability was the MIT AI Lab's TECO. Short

for Text Editor and COrrector, the program had been

upgraded by hackers from an old teletype line editor

for the lab's PDP-6 machine.ccording to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally

stood for Tape Editor and Corrector.

TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors,

but it still had its drawbacks. To create and edit a

document, a programmer had to enter a series of

software commands specifying each edit. It was an

abstract process. Unlike modern word processors, which

update text with each keystroke, TECO demanded that the

user enter an extended series of editing instructions

followed by an "end of command" sequence just to change

the text.Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to

write entire documents in edit mode, but as Stallman

himself would later point out, the process required "a

mental skill like that of blindfold chess."See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The

Extensible,

Customizable, Display Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An

updated HTML version of this memo, from which I am

quoting, is available at

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html.

To facilitate the process, AI Lab hackers had built a

system that displayed both the "source" and "display"

modes on a split screen. Despite this innovative hack,

switching from mode to mode was still a nuisance.

TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around

the computer world at this time. During a visit to the

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman

encountered an edit program named E. The program

contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to

update display text after each command keystroke. In

the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the

first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors. Short for "what you

see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user could

manipulate the file by moving through the displayed

text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."See Richard

Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor"

(1987).

http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt

Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to

expand TECO's functionality in similar fashion upon his

return to MIT. He found a TECO feature called

Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named after

the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson's

hack switched TECO from its usual abstract

command-execution mode to a more intuitive

keystroke-by-keystroke mode. Stallman revised the

feature in a subtle but significant way. He made it

possible to trigger other TECO command strings, or "

macros," using other, two-key combinations. Where users

had once entered command strings and discarded them

after entering then, Stallman's hack made it possible

to save macro tricks on file and call them up at will.

Mikkelson's hack had raised TECO to the level of a

WYSIWYG editor. Stallman's hack had raised it to the

level of a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. "That was

the real breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI

Lab hacker at the time.

By Stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched

off an explosion of further innovation. "Everybody and

his brother was writing his own collection of redefined

screen-editor commands, a command for everything he

typically liked to do," Stallman would later recall.

"People would pass them around and improve them, making

them more powerful and more general. The collections of

redefinitions gradually became system programs in their

own right."

So many people found the macro innovations useful and

had incorporated it into their own TECO programs that

the TECO editor had become secondary to the macro mania

it inspired. "We started to categorize it mentally as a

programming language rather than as an editor,"

Stallman says. Users were experiencing their own

pleasure tweaking the software and trading new ideas.

Two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation

began to exhibit dangerous side effects. The explosive

growth had provided an exciting validation of the

collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to

over-complexity. "We had a Tower of Babel effect," says

Guy Steele.

The effect threatened to kill the spirit that had

created it, Steele says. Hackers had designed ITS to

facilitate programmers' ability to share knowledge and

improve each other's work. That meant being able to sit

down at another programmer's desk, open up a

programmer's work and make comments and modifications

directly within the software. "Sometimes the easiest

way to show somebody how to program or debug something

was simply to sit down at the terminal and do it for

them," explains Steele.

The macro feature, after its second year, began to foil

this capability. In their eagerness to embrace the new

full-screen capabilities, hackers had customized their

versions of TECO to the point where a hacker sitting

down at another hacker's terminal usually had to spend

the first hour just figuring out what macro commands

did what.

Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve

the problem. He gathered together the four different

macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting

the most useful macro commands. In the course of

implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele

says he attracted Stallman's attention.

"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I

was doing," recalls Steele.

For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with

Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out.

Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked

was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO

maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work

"interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.

"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the

implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele

with a laugh.

The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of

Stallman. Short for "editing macros," it signified the

evolutionary transcendence that had taken place during

the macros explosion two years before. It also took

advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon.

Noting a lack of programs on ITS starting with the

letter "E," Stallman chose Emacs, making it possible to

reference the program with a single letter. Once again,

the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark.

In the course of developing a standard system of macro

commands, Stallman and Steele had to traverse a

political tightrope. In creating a standard program,

Stallman was in clear violation of the fundamental

hacker tenet-"promote decentralization." He was also

threatening to hobble the very flexibility that had

fueled TECO's explosive innovation in the first place.

"On the one hand, we were trying to make a uniform

command set again; on the other hand, we wanted to keep

it open ended, because the programmability was

important," recalls Steele.

To solve the problem, Stallman, Steele, and fellow

hackers David Moon and Dan Weinreib limited their

standardization effort to the WYSIWYG commands that

controlled how text appeared on-screen. The rest of the

Emacs effort would be devoted to retaining the

program's Tinker Toy-style extensibility.

Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made

changes but didn't communicate those changes back to

the rest of the community, the Tower of Babel effect

would simply emerge in other places. Falling back on

the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, Stallman

embedded a statement within the source code that set

the terms of use. Users were free to modify and

redistribute the code on the condition that they gave

back all the extensions they made. Stallman dubbed it

the " Emacs Commune." Just as TECO had become more than

a simple editor, Emacs had become more than a simple

software program. To Stallman, it was a social

contract. In an early memo documenting the project,

Stallman spelled out the contract terms. "EMACS," he

wrote, "was distributed on a basis of communal sharing,

which means that all improvements must be given back to

me to be incorporated and distributed."See Stallman (1979): #SEC34.

Not everybody accepted the contract. The explosive

innovation continued throughout the decade, resulting

in a host of Emacs-like programs with varying degrees

of cross-compatibility. A few cited their relation to

Stallman's original Emacs with humorously recursive

names: Sine (Sine is not Emacs), Eine (Eine is not

Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially). As a

devoted exponent of the hacker ethic, Stallman saw no

reason to halt this innovation through legal

harassment. Still, the fact that some people would so

eagerly take software from the community chest, alter

it, and slap a new name on the resulting software

displayed a stunning lack of courtesy.

Such rude behavior was reflected against other,

unsettling developments in the hacker community. Brian

Reid's 1979 decision to embed "time bombs" in Scribe,

making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user

access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman.

"He considered it the most Nazi thing he ever saw in

his life," recalls Reid. Despite going on to later

Internet fame as the cocreator of the Usenet alt

heirarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that

1979 decision, at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said

that all software should be free and the prospect of

charging money for software was a crime against humanity."In a 1996 interview

with online magazine MEME ,

Stallman cited Scribe's sale as irksome, but hesitated

to mention Reid by name. "The problem was nobody

censured or punished this student for what he did,"

Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted

to follow his example." See MEME 2.04.

http://memex.org/meme2-04.html

Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid's

sale, he did possess the ability to curtail other forms

of behavior deemed contrary to the hacker ethos. As

central source-code maintainer for the Emacs "commune,"

Stallman began to wield his power for political effect.

During his final stages of conflict with the

administrators at the Laboratory for Computer Science

over password systems, Stallman initiated a software " strike,"See Steven Levy,

Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],

1984): 419.

refusing to send lab members the latest version of

Emacs until they rejected the security system on the

lab's computers. The move did little to improve

Stallman's growing reputation as an extremist, but it

got the point across: commune members were expected to

speak up for basic hacker values.

"A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was

trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in

a sense I was," Stallman would later tell author Steven

Levy. "I was engaging in violence against them because

I thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large."

Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker

ethic. The flexibility Stallman and built into the

software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded

it. Users who didn't keep abreast of the latest

developments in Emacs evolution or didn't contribute

their contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of

missing out on the latest breakthroughs. And the

breakthroughs were many. Twenty years later, users had

modified Emacs for so many different uses-using it as a

spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser-that

later Emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to

represent its versatile functionality. "That's the idea

that we wanted to convey," says Stallman. "The amount

of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful

and awful at the same time."

Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable.

Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with

Stallman during the 1970s and would later assist

Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software

Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant

creation." In giving programmers a way to add new

software libraries and features without messing up the

system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future

large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its

structure was robust enough that you'd have people all

over the world who were loosely collaborating [and]

contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't know if

that had been done before."In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more

on

the social significance of Emacs than the software

significance. To read more about the software side, I

recommend Stallman's 1979 memo. I particularly

recommend the section titled "Research Through

Development of Installed Tools" (#SEC27). Not only is

it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds

light on how closely intertwined Stallman's political

philosophies are with his software-design philosophies.

A sample excerpt follows: EMACS could not have been

reached by a process of careful design, because such

processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the

outset, and whose desirability is established on the

bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else

visualized an extensible editor until I had made one,

nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it.

EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually

useful small improvements on a path whose end was not

in sight.

Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a

research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers

Stallman primarily as a "brilliant programmer with the

ability to generate large quantities of relatively

bug-free code." Although their personalities didn't

exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long

enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman's

intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in

the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together

to write the editor's "pretty print" feature.

Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was

another keystroke-triggerd feature that reformatted

Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable

and took up less space, further bolstering the

program's WYSIWIG qualities. The feature was strategic

enough to attract Stallman's active interest, and it

wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman

were planning an improved version.

"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at

the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He

was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also

telling me what to type.

The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout

that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman

took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the

session, they had managed to hack the pretty print

source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were

on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but

it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the

screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

The length of the session revealed itself when Steele

finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building

at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself

surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer,

Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still,

something about this session was different. Working

with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all

external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies

on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found

the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at

the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was

a great experience, very intense, and that I never

wanted to do it again in my life."

A Stark Moral Choice

On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on

to the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an

unusual message. Posted in the small hours of the

morning, 12:30 a.m. to be exact, and signed by

rms@mit-oz , the message's subject line was terse but

attention-grabbing. "New UNIX implementation," it read.

Instead of introducing a newly released version of

Unix, however, the message's opening paragraph issued a

call to arms: Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to

write a complete Unix-compatible software system called

GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to

everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money,

programs and equipment are greatly needed.1 To an

experienced Unix developer, the message was a mixture

of idealism and hubris. Not only did the author pledge

to rebuild the already mature Unix operating system

from the ground up, he also proposed to improve it in

places. The new GNU system, the author predicted, would

carry all the usual components-a text editor, a shell

program to run Unix-compatible applications, a

compiler, "and a few other things."See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU

Announcement"

(September 1983).

http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/initial-announcement.html

It would also contain many enticing features that

other Unix systems didn't yet offer: a graphic user

interface based on the Lisp programming language, a

crash-proof file system, and networking protocols built

according to MIT's internal networking system.

"GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be

identical to Unix," the author wrote. "We will make all

improvements that are convenient, based on our

experience with other operating systems."

Anticipating a skeptical response on some readers'

part, the author made sure to follow up his

operating-system outline with a brief biographical

sketch titled, "Who am I?": I am Richard Stallman,

inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor,

now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have

worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers,

command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing

System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I

pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS.

In addition I have implemented one crashproof file

system and two window systems for Lisp machines. As

fate would have it, Stallman's fanciful GNU Project

missed its Thanksgiving launch date. By January, 1984,

however, Stallman made good on his promise and fully

immersed himself in the world of Unix software

development. For a software architect raised on ITS, it

was like designing suburban shopping malls instead of

Moorish palaces. Even so, building a Unix-like

operating system had its hidden advantages. ITS had

been powerful, but it also possessed an Achilles' heel:

MIT hackers had designed it to take specific advantage

of the DEC-built PDP line. When AI Lab administrators

elected to phase out the lab's powerful PDP-10 machine

in the early 1980s, the operating system that hackers

once likened to a vibrant city became an instant ghost

town. Unix, on the other hand, was designed for

mobility and long-term survival. Originally developed

by junior scientists at AT&T, the program had slipped

out under corporate-management radar, finding a happy

home in the cash-strapped world of academic computer

systems. With fewer resources than their MIT brethren,

Unix developers had customized the software to ride

atop a motley assortment of hardware systems:

everything from the 16-bit PDP-11-a machine considered

fit for only small tasks by most AI Lab hackers-to

32-bit mainframes such as the VAX 11/780. By 1983, a

few companies, most notably Sun Microsystems, were even

going so far as to develop a new generation of

microcomputers, dubbed "workstations," to take

advantage of the increasingly ubiquitous operating system.

To facilitate this process, the developers in charge of

designing the dominant Unix strains made sure to keep

an extra layer of abstraction between the software and

the machine. Instead of tailoring the operating system

to take advantage of a specific machine's resources-as

the AI Lab hackers had done with ITS and the

PDP-10-Unix developers favored a more generic,

off-the-rack approach. Focusing more on the

interlocking standards and specifications that held the

operating system's many subcomponents together, rather

than the actual components themselves, they created a

system that could be quickly modified to suit the

tastes of any machine. If a user quibbled with a

certain portion, the standards made it possible to pull

out an individual subcomponent and either fix it or

replace it with something better. Simply put, what the

Unix approach lacked in terms of style or aesthetics,

it more than made up for in terms of flexibility and

economy, hence its rapid adoption.See Marshall Kirk McKusick, "Twenty Years of

Berkeley

Unix," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.,

1999): 38.

Stallman's decision to start developing the GNU system

was triggered by the end of the ITS system that the AI

Lab hackers had nurtured for so long. The demise of ITS

had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. Coming on the

heels of the Xerox laser printer episode, it offered

further evidence that the AI Lab hacker culture was

losing its immunity to business practices in the

outside world.

Like the software code that composed it, the roots of

ITS' demise stretched way back. Defense spending, long

a major font for computer-science research, had dried

up during the post-Vietnam years. In a desperate quest

for new funds, laboratories and universities turned to

the private sector. In the case of the AI Lab, winning

over private investors was an easy sell. Home to some

of the most ambitious computer-science projects of the

post-war era, the lab became a quick incubator of

technology. Indeed, by 1980, most of the lab's staff,

including many hackers, were dividing its time between

Institute and commercial projects.

What at first seemed like a win-win deal-hackers got to

work on the best projects, giving the lab first look at

many of the newest computer technologies coming down

the pike-soon revealed itself as a Faustian bargain.

The more time hackers devoted to cutting-edge

commercial projects, the less time they had to devote

to general maintenance on the lab's baroque software

infrastructure. Soon, companies began hiring away

hackers outright in an attempt to monopolize their time

and attention. With fewer hackers to mind the shop,

programs and machines took longer to fix. Even worse,

Stallman says, the lab began to undergo a "demographic

change." The hackers who had once formed a vocal

minority within the AI Lab were losing membership while

"the professors and the students who didn't really love

the [PDP-10] were just as numerous as before."See Richard Stallman (1986).

The breaking point came in 1982. That was the year the

lab's administration decided to upgrade its main

computer, the PDP-10. Digital, the corporation that

manufactured the PDP-10, had discontinued the line.

Although the company still offered a high-powered

mainframe, dubbed the KL-10, the new machine required a

drastic rewrite or "port" of ITS if hackers wanted to

continue running the same operating system. Fearful

that the lab had lost its critical mass of in-house

programming talent, AI Lab faculty members pressed for

Twenex, a commercial operating system developed by

Digital. Outnumbered, the hackers had no choice but to comply.

"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty

members] said, `We're going to have a disaster; we must

have commercial software,'" Stallman would recall a few

years later. "They said, `We can expect the company to

maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong,

but that's what they did."

At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet

another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted.

The system's name itself was a protest. Officially

dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a

commercial operating system DEC marketed for the

PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had deveoped an improved

version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.Multiple sources: see Richard

Stallman interview,

Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0.

http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html

Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says

he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the

TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there

was no way I was going to call it that," Stallman

recalls. "So I decided to insert a `w' in the Tenex

name and call it Twenex."

The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its

own derisive nickname: Oz. According to one hacker

legend, the machine got its nickname because it

required a smaller PDP-11 machine to power its

terminal. One hacker, upon viewing the KL-10-PDP-11

setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard's

bombastic onscreen introduction in the Wizard of Oz. "I

am the great and powerful Oz," the hacker intoned. "Pay

no attention to the PDP-11 behind that console."See

http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/See_Figure_1.txt

If hackers laughed when they first encountered the

KL-10, their laughter quickly died when they

encountered Twenex. Not only did Twenex boast built-in

security, but the system's software engineers had

designed the tools and applications with the security

system in mind. What once had been a cat-and-mouse game

over passwords in the case of the Laboratory for

Computer Science's security system, now became an

out-and-out battle over system management. System

administrators argued that without security, the Oz

system was more prone to accidental crashes. Hackers

argued that crashes could be better prevented by

overhauling the source code. Unfortunately, the number

of hackers with the time and inclination to perform

this sort of overhaul had dwindled to the point that

the system-administrator argument prevailed.

Cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system

in order to glean evidence from the resulting wreckage,

Stallman successfully foiled the system administrators'

attempt to assert control. After one foiled "coup

d'etat," Stallman issued an alert to the entire AI staff.

"There has been another attempt to seize power,"

Stallman wrote. "So far, the aristocratic forces have

been defeated." To protect his identity, Stallman

signed the message "Radio Free OZ."

The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982,

Stallman's aversion to passwords and secrecy had become

so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were

using his account as a stepping stone to the ARPAnet,

the research-funded computer network that would serve

as a foundation for today's Internet. One such

"tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a

California programmer who learned through the hacking

grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain

access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under

the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter

monogram when the system requested a password.

"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other

people use their computers for free," says Hopkins. "It

meant a lot to many people."

This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly

tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,See "MIT AI Lab Tourist

Policy."

http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/tourist-policy.html

fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab's primary

link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his

policy of repeating his login ID as a password so

outside users could follow in his footsteps. Over time,

however, the Oz's fragility prompted administrators to

bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious

intent, might bring down the system. When those same

administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop

publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal

ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system

altogether.3

"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I

[decided] to follow my belief that there should be no

passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I don't

believe that it's really desirable to have security on

a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the

security regime."

Stallman's refusal to bow before the great and powerful

Oz symbolized the growing tension between hackers and

AI Lab management during the early 1980s. This tension

paled in comparison to the conflict that raged within

the hacker community itself. By the time the KL-10

arrived, the hacker community had already divided into

two camps. The first centered around a software company

called Symbolics, Inc. The second centered around

Symbolics chief rival, Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI). Both

companies were in a race to market the Lisp Machine, a

device built to take full advantage of the Lisp

programming language.

Created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer

John McCarthy, a MIT artificial-intelligence researcher

during the late 1950s, Lisp is an elegant language

well-suited for programs charged with heavy-duty

sorting and processing. The language's name is a

shortened version of LISt Processing. Following

McCarthy's departure to the Stanford Artificial

Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the

language into a local dialect dubbed MACLISP. The "MAC"

stood for Project MAC, the DARPA-funded research

project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the

Laboratory for Computer Science. Led by AI Lab

arch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, AI Lab programmers

during the 1970s built up an entire Lisp-based

operating system, dubbed the Lisp Machine operating

system. By 1980, the Lisp Machine project had generated

two commercial spin-offs. Symbolics was headed by

Russell Noftsker, a former AI Lab administrator, and

Lisp Machines, Inc., was headed by Greenblatt.

The Lisp Machine software was hacker-built, meaning it

was owned by MIT but available for anyone to copy as

per hacker custom. Such a system limited the marketing

advantage of any company hoping to license the software

from MIT and market it as unique. To secure an

advantage, and to bolster the aspects of the operating

system that customers might consider attractive, the

companies recruited various AI Lab hackers and set them

working on various components of the Lisp Machine

operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab.

The most aggressive in this strategy was Symbolics. By

the end of 1980, the company had hired 14 AI Lab

staffers as part-time consultants to develop its

version of the Lisp Machine. Apart from Stallman, the

rest signed on to help LMI.See H. P. Newquist, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego,

and

Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think (Sams

Publishing, 1994): 172.

At first, Stallman accepted both companies' attempt to

commercialize the Lisp machine, even though it meant

more work for him. Both licensed the Lisp Machine OS

source code from MIT, and it was Stallman's job to

update the lab's own Lisp Machine to keep pace with the

latest innovations. Although Symbolics' license with

MIT gave Stallman the right to review, but not copy,

Symbolics' source code, Stallman says a "gentleman's

agreement" between Symbolics management and the AI Lab

made it possible to borrow attractive snippets in

traditional hacker fashion.

On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well

because it was his birthday, Symbolics executives

decided to end this gentlemen's agreement. The move was

largely strategic. LMI, the primary competition in the

Lisp Machine marketplace, was essentially using a copy

of the AI Lab Lisp Machine. Rather than subsidize the

development of a market rival, Symbolics executives

elected to enforce the letter of the license. If the AI

Lab wanted its operating system to stay current with

the Symbolics operating system, the lab would have to

switch over to a Symbolics machine and sever its

connection to LMI.

As the person responsible for keeping up the lab's Lisp

Machine, Stallman was incensed. Viewing this

announcement as an "ultimatum," he retaliated by

disconnecting Symbolics' microwave communications link

to the laboratory. He then vowed never to work on a

Symbolics machine and pledged his immediate allegiance

to LMI. "The way I saw it, the AI Lab was a neutral

country, like Belgium in World War I," Stallman says.

"If Germany invades Belgium, Belgium declares war on

Germany and sides with Britain and France."

The circumstances of the so-called "Symbolics War" of

1982-1983 depend heavily on the source doing the

telling. When Symbolics executives noticed that their

latest features were still appearing in the AI Lab Lisp

Machine and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they

installed a "spy" program on Stallman's computer

terminal. Stallman says he was rewriting the features

from scratch, taking advantage of the license's review

clause but also taking pains to make the source code as

different as possible. Symbolics executives argued

otherwise and took their case to MIT administration.

According to 1994 book, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego,

and Greed, and the Quest for Machines That Think,

written by Harvey Newquist, the administration

responded with a warning to Stallman to "stay away"

from the Lisp Machine project.Ibid.: 196. According to Stallman,

MIT administrators backed Stallman up. "I was never

threatened," he says. "I did make changes in my

practices, though. Just to be ultra safe, I no longer

read their source code. I used only the documentation

and wrote the code from that."

Whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified

Stallman's resolve. With no source code to review,

Stallman filled in the software gaps according to his

own tastes and enlisted members of the AI Lab to

provide a continuous stream of bug reports. He also

made sure LMI programmers had direct access to the

changes. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the

last thing I did," Stallman says.

Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed

light on Stallman's nonpacifist nature, they also

reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the

conflict. According to another Newquist-related story,

Stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an

email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk

into Symbolics' offices."Ibid. Newquist, who says this anecdote was confirmed

by

several Symbolics executives, writes, "The message

caused a brief flurry of excitement and speculation on

the part of Symbolics' employees, but ultimately, no

one took Stallman's outburst that seriously."

Although Stallman would deny any memory of the email

and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor,"

he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head.

"I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and

destroying their building in the process," Stallman

says. "I thought my life was over."

The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed

as the "destruction" of his "home"-i.e., the demise of

the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In a later

email interview with Levy, Stallman would liken himself

to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving

member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out

during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The

analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost

mythical, terms. In reality, however, it glosses over

the tension between Stallman and his fellow AI Lab

hackers prior to the Symbolics-LMI schism. Instead of

seeing Symbolics as an exterminating force, many of

Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for

relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the

company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven

software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the

AI Lab and into the corporate marketplace where

manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than

viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as

a troubling anachronism.

Stallman does not dispute this alternate view of

historical events. In fact, he says it was yet another

reason for the hostility triggered by the Symbolics

"ultimatum." Even before Symbolics hired away most of

the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the

hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him.

"I was no longer getting invited to go to Chinatown,"

Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was

that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent

a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted

to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting

asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one

person later confessed that he had been pressured to

lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me

a secret."

Although Stallman felt anger toward the hackers who

orchestrated this petty form of ostracism, the

Symbolics controversy dredged up a new kind of anger,

the anger of a person about to lose his home. When

Symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes,

Stallman responded by holing up in his MIT offices and

rewriting each new software feature and tool from

scratch. Frustrating as it may have been, it guaranteed

that future Lisp Machine users had unfettered access to

the same features as Symbolics users.

It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within

the hacker community. Already renowned for his work

with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of

an entire team of Symbolics programmers-a team that

included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still

stands has one of the major human accomplishments of

the Information Age, or of any age for that matter.

Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a

"virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven

Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals

had no choice but to pay their idealistic former

comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a

hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the

company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over

Stallman's output during this period: I can see

something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad

(probably not, but somebody could convince me it was

bad), and I would still say, "But wait a

minute-Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all

night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible

anyone could do this alone!"See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],

1984): 426.

For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with

Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound

sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had

served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In

many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of

passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever

since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the

same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic

destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had

nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day,

while taking a break from writing code, Stallman

experienced a traumatic moment passing through the

lab's equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the

hulking, unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled

by the dormant lights, lights that once actively

blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the

internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact

was not unlike coming across a beloved family member's

well-preserved corpse.

"I started crying right there in the equipment room,"

he says. "Seeing the machine there, dead, with nobody

left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my

community had been destroyed."

Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The

Lisp Machine, despite all the furor it invoked and all

the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a

sideshow to the large battles in the technology

marketplace. The relentless pace of computer

miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful

microprocessors that would soon incorporate the

machine's hardware and software capabilities like a

modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.

Riding atop this microprocessor wave were

hundreds-thousands-of commercial software programs,

each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and

nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for

hackers to review or share source code. The licenses

were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become

strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away

would-be interlopers. Software, once a form of garnish

most hardware companies gave away to make their

expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly

becoming the main dish. In their increasing hunger for

new games and features, users were putting aside the

traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal.

Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in

the realm of personal computer systems. Companies such

as Apple Computer and Commodore were minting fresh

millionaires selling machines with built-in operating

systems. Unaware of the hacker culture and its distaste

for binary-only software, many of these users saw

little need to protest when these companies failed to

attach the accompanying source-code files. A few

anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped propel

that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most

part, the marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy

enough to write new programs and savvy enough to

copyright them as legally protected works.

One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill

Gates, a Harvard dropout two years Stallman's junior.

Although Stallman didn't know it at the time, seven

years before sending out his message to the n

et.unix-wizards newsgroup, Gates, a budding

entrepreneur and general partner with the

Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later

spelled as Microsoft, had sent out his own open letter

to the software-developer community. Written in

response to the PC users copying Micro-Soft's software

programs, Gates' " Open Letter to Hobbyists" had

excoriated the notion of communal software development.

"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"

asked Gates. "What hobbyist can put three man-years

into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his

product, and distributing it for free?"See Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to

Hobbyists" (February

3, 1976). To view an online copy of this letter, go to

http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html.

Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive,

Gates' 1976 letter nevertheless represented the

changing attitude toward software both among commercial

software companies and commercial software developers.

Why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the

market said otherwise? As the 1970s gave way to the

1980s, selling software became more than a way to

recoup costs; it became a political statement. At a

time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to

dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending

programs that had been built up during the half century

following the Great Depression, more than a few

software programmers saw the hacker ethic as

anticompetitive and, by extension, un-American. At

best, it was a throwback to the anticorporate attitudes

of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street

banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between

French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many

computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an

embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age.

For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as an

embarrassing throwback to the 1950s, Stallman didn't

mind living out of step with his peers. As a programmer

used to working with the best machines and the best

software, however, Stallman faced what he could only

describe as a "stark moral choice": either get over his

ethical objection for " proprietary" software-the term

Stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any

program that carried private copyright or end-user

license that restricted copying and modification-or

dedicate his life to building an alternate,

nonproprietary system of software programs. Given his

recent months-long ordeal with Symbolics, Stallman felt

more comfortable with the latter option. "I suppose I

could have stopped working on computers altogether,"

Stallman says. "I had no special skills, but I'm sure I

could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant,

probably, but I could've been a waiter somewhere."

Being a waiter-i.e., dropping out of programming

altogether-would have meant completely giving up an

activity, computer programming, that had given him so

much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to

Cambridge, Stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy

periods when software programming provided the only

pleasure. Rather than drop out, Stallman decided to

stick it out.

An atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate,

dharma, or a divine calling in life. Nevertheless, he

does feel that the decision to shun proprietary

software and build an operating system to help others

do the same was a natural one. After all, it was

Stallman's own personal combination of stubbornness,

foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to

consider a fork in the road most others didn't know

existed. In describing the decision in a chapter for

the 1999 book, Open Sources, Stallman cites the spirit

encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage Hillel: If

I am not for myself, who will be for me?If I am only

for myself, what am I?If not now, when?See Richard Stallman, Open Sources

(O'Reilly &

Associates, Inc., 1999): 56. Stallman adds his own

footnote to this statement, writing, "As an atheist, I

don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes

find I admire something one of them has said."

Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious

route and expresses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I

asked myself: what could I, an operating-system

developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until

I examined the question for a while that I realized an

operating-system developer was exactly what was needed

to solve the problem."

Once he reached that decision, Stallman says,

everything else "fell into place." He would abstain

from using software programs that forced him to

compromise his ethical beliefs, while at the same time

devoting his life to the creation of software that

would make it easier for others to follow the same

path. Pledging to build a free software operating

system "or die trying-of old age, of course," Stallman

quips, he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984,

to build GNU.

The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the

legal auspices of MIT. Still, Stallman had enough

friends and allies within the AI Lab to retain

rent-free access to his MIT office. He also had the

ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite

the early stages of the GNU Project. In resigning from

MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about

conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the

software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social

isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI

Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between

himself and that environment.

For the first few months, Stallman operated in

isolation from the Unix community as well. Although his

announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had

attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed

on to join the crusade in its early stages.

"The community reaction was pretty much uniform,"

recalls Rich Morin, leader of a Unix user group at the

time. "People said, `Oh, that's a great idea. Show us

your code. Show us it can be done.'"

In true hacker fashion, Stallman began looking for

existing programs and tools that could be converted

into GNU programs and tools. One of the first was a

compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written

in the popular C programming language into

machine-readable code. Translated from the Dutch, the

program's acronym stood for the Free University

Compiler Kit. Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's

author if the program was free. When the author

informed him that the words "Free University" were a

reference to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam,

Stallman was chagrined.

"He responded derisively, stating that the university

was free but the compiler was not," recalls Stallman.

"I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU

Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform compiler."

Eventually Stallman found a Pastel language compiler

written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National

Lab. According to Stallman's knowledge at the time, the

compiler was free to copy and modify. Unfortunately,

the program possessed a sizable design flaw: it saved

each program into core memory, tying up precious space

for other software activities. On mainframe systems

this design flaw had been forgivable. On Unix systems

it was a crippling barrier, since the machines that ran

Unix were too small to handle the large files

generated. Stallman made substantial progress at first,

building a C-compatible frontend to the compiler. By

summer, however, he had come to the conclusion that he

would have to build a totally new compiler from scratch.

In September of 1984, Stallman shelved compiler

development for the near term and began searching for

lower-lying fruit. He began development of a GNU

version of Emacs, the program he himself had been

supervising for a decade. The decision was strategic.

Within the Unix community, the two native editor

programs were vi, written by Sun Microsystems cofounder

Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist (and

Unix cocreator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and

popular, but neither offered the endlessly expandable

nature of Emacs. In rewriting Emacs for the Unix

audience, Stallman stood a better chance of showing off

his skills. It also stood to reason that Emacs users

might be more attuned to the Stallman mentality.

Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision

in strategic terms. "I wanted an Emacs, and I had a

good opportunity to develop one."

Once again, the notion of reinventing the wheel grated

on Stallman's efficient hacker sensibilities. In

writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon

following the footsteps of Carnegie Mellon graduate

student James Gosling, author of a C-based version

dubbed Gosling Emacs or GOSMACS. Gosling's version of

Emacs included an interpreter that exploited a

simplified offshoot of the Lisp language called

MOCKLISP. Determined to build GNU Emacs on a similar

Lisp foundation, Stallman borrowed copiously from

Gosling's innovations. Although Gosling had put GOSMACS

under copyright and had sold the rights to UniPress, a

privately held software company, Stallman cited the

assurances of a fellow developer who had participated

in the early MOCKLISP interpreter. According to the

developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie

Mellon, had assured early collaborators that their work

would remain accessible. When UniPress caught wind of

Stallman's project, however, the company threatened to

enforce the copyright. Once again, Stallman faced the

prospect of building from the ground up.

In the course of reverse-engineering Gosling's

interpreter, Stallman would create a fully functional

Lisp interpreter, rendering the need for Gosling's

original interpreter moot. Nevertheless, the notion of

developers selling off software rights-indeed, the very

notion of developers having software rights to sell in

the first place-rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at

the Swedish Royal Technical Institute, Stallman cited

the UniPress incident as yet another example of the

dangers associated with proprietary software.

"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things

I could do with my life is find a gigantic pile of

proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start

handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be

a trade secret any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that

would be a much more efficient way for me to give

people new free software than actually writing it

myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it."

Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over

Gosling's innovations would assist both Stallman and

the free software movement in the long term. It would

force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs

Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed

problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force

Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's

political objectives. Following the release of GNU

Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued " The GNU Manifesto," an

expansion of the original announcement posted in

September, 1983. Stallman included within the document

a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by

commercial and academic programmers to justify the

proliferation of proprietary software programs. One

argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their

creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's

anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:

"If anything deserves a reward, it is social

contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a

social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as

society is free to use the results. If programmers

deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative

programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished

if they restrict the use of these programs."See Richard Stallman, "The GNU

Manifesto" (1985).

http://www.gnu.org/manifesto.html