Free as in Freedom

by Sam Williams

Chapter 1: For Want of a Printer

I fear the Greeks. Even when they bring gifts. ---Virgil, The Aeneid

The new printer was jammed, again.

Richard M. Stallman, a staff software programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), discovered the malfunction the hard way. An hour after sending off a 50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27, broke off a productive work session to retrieve his documents. Upon arrival, he found only four pages in the printer's tray. To make matters even more frustrating, the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that Stallman's print job and the unfinished portion of somebody else's print job were still trapped somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab's computer network.

Waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when you're a software programmer, so Stallman took his frustration with a grain of salt. Still, the difference between waiting for a machine and waiting on a machine is a sizable one. It wasn't the first time he'd been forced to stand over the printer, watching pages print out one by one. As a person who spent the bulk of his days and nights improving the efficiency of machines and the software programs that controlled them, Stallman felt a natural urge to open up the machine, look at the guts, and seek out the root of the problem.

Unfortunately, Stallman's skills as a computer programmer did not extend to the mechanical-engineering realm. As freshly printed documents poured out of the machine, Stallman had a chance to reflect on other ways to circumvent the printing jam problem.

How long ago had it been that the staff members at the AI Lab had welcomed the new printer with open arms? Stallman wondered. The machine had been a donation from the Xerox Corporation. A cutting edge prototype, it was a modified version of the popular Xerox photocopier. Only instead of making copies, it relied on software data piped in over a computer network to turn that data into professional-looking documents. Created by engineers at the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Facility, it was, quite simply, an early taste of the desktop-printing revolution that would seize the rest of the computing industry by the end of the decade.

Driven by an instinctual urge to play with the best new equipment, programmers at the AI Lab promptly integrated the new machine into the lab's sophisticated computing infrastructure. The results had been immediately pleasing. Unlike the lab's old laser printer, the new Xerox machine was fast. Pages came flying out at a rate of one per second, turning a 20-minute print job into a 2-minute print job. The new machine was also more precise. Circles came out looking like circles, not ovals. Straight lines came out looking like straight lines, not low-amplitude sine waves.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a gift too good to refuse.

It wasn't until a few weeks after its arrival that the machine's flaws began to surface. Chief among the drawbacks was the machine's inherent susceptibility to paper jams. Engineering-minded programmers quickly understood the reason behind the flaw. As a photocopier, the machine generally required the direct oversight of a human operator. Figuring that these human operators would always be on hand to fix a paper jam, if it occurred, Xerox engineers had devoted their time and energies to eliminating other pesky problems. In engineering terms, user diligence was built into the system.

In modifying the machine for printer use, Xerox engineers had changed the user-machine relationship in a subtle but profound way. Instead of making the machine subservient to an individual human operator, they made it subservient to an entire networked population of human operators. Instead of standing directly over the machine, a human user on one end of the network sent his print command through an extended bucket-brigade of machines, expecting the desired content to arrive at the targeted destination and in proper form. It wasn't until he finally went to check up on the final output that he realized how little of the desired content had made it through.

Stallman had been one of the first to identify the problem and to suggest a remedy. Years before, when the lab was still using its old printer, Stallman had solved a similar problem by opening up the software program that regulated the printer on the lab's PDP-11 machine. Stallman couldn't eliminate paper jams, but he could insert a software command that ordered the PDP-11 to check the printer periodically and report back to the PDP-10, the lab's central computer. To ensure that one user's negligence didn't bog down an entire line of print jobs, Stallman also inserted a software command that instructed the PDP-10 to notify every user with a waiting print job that the printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something along the lines of "The printer is jammed, please fix it," and because it went out to the people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were higher that the problem got fixed in due time.

As fixes go, Stallman's was oblique but elegant. It didn't fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. In programming terms, Stallman's fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network.

"If you got that message, you couldn't assume somebody else would fix it," says Stallman, recalling the logic. "You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem." Such clever fixes were a trademark of the AI Lab and its indigenous population of programmers. Indeed, the best programmers at the AI Lab disdained the term programmer, preferring the more slangy occupational title of hacker instead. The job title covered a host of activities-everything from creative mirth making to the improvement of existing software and computer systems. Implicit within the title, however, was the old-fashioned notion of Yankee ingenuity. To be a hacker, one had to accept the philosophy that writing a software program was only the beginning. Improving a program was the true test of a hacker's skills.1

Such a philosophy was a major reason why companies like Xerox made it a policy to donate their machines and software programs to places where hackers typically congregated. If hackers improved the software, companies could borrow back the improvements, incorporating them into update versions for the commercial marketplace. In corporate terms, hackers were a leveragable community asset, an auxiliary research-and-development division available at minimal cost.

It was because of this give-and-take philosophy that when Stallman spotted the print-jam defect in the Xerox laser printer, he didn't panic. He simply looked for a way to update the old fix or " hack" for the new system. In the course of looking up the Xerox laser-printer software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer didn't have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow programmer could read. Until then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code files-readable text files that documented the individual software commands that told a machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software files in precompiled, or binary, form. Programmers were free to open the files up if they wanted to, but unless they were an expert in deciphering an endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure gibberish.

Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he was not an expert in translating binary files. As a hacker, however, he had other resources at his disposal. The notion of information sharing was so central to the hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a matter of time before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired source-code files.

After the first few printer jams, Stallman comforted himself with the memory of a similar situation years before. The lab had needed a cross-network program to help the PDP-11 work more efficiently with the PDP-10. The lab's hackers were more than up to the task, but Stallman, a Harvard alumnus, recalled a similar program written by programmers at the Harvard computer-science department. The Harvard computer lab used the same model computer, the PDP-10, albeit with a different operating system. The Harvard computer lab also had a policy requiring that all programs installed on the PDP-10 had to come with published source-code files.

Taking advantage of his access to the Harvard computer lab, Stallman dropped in, made a copy of the cross-network source code, and brought it back to the AI Lab. He then rewrote the source code to make it more suitable for the AI Lab's operating system. With no muss and little fuss, the AI Lab shored up a major gap in its software infrastructure. Stallman even added a few features not found in the original Harvard program, making the program even more useful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman says.

From the perspective of a 1970s-era programmer, the transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor stopping by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a neighbor. The only difference was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab, Stallman had done nothing to deprive Harvard hackers the use of their original program. If anything, Harvard hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had introduced his own additional features to the program, features that hackers at Harvard were perfectly free to borrow in return. Although nobody at Harvard ever came over to borrow the program back, Stallman does recall a programmer at the private engineering firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program and adding a few additional features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated into the AI Lab's own source-code archive.

"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman, recalling the software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get replaced and rebuilt. New things would get added on. But you could always look at a certain part and say, `Hmm, by the style, I see this part was written back in the early 60s and this part was written in the mid-1970s.'"

Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the AI Lab and other places built up robust creations. On the west coast, computer scientists at UC Berkeley, working in cooperation with a few low-level engineers at AT&T, had built up an entire operating system using this system. Dubbed Unix, a play on an older, more academically respectable operating system called Multics, the software system was available to any programmer willing to pay for the cost of copying the program onto a new magnetic tape and shipping it. Not every programmer participating in this culture described himself as a hacker, but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was good enough to solve somebody else's problems. Why not share it out of a simple desire for good karma?

The fact that Xerox had been unwilling to share its source-code files seemed a minor annoyance at first. In tracking down a copy of the source-code files, Stallman says he didn't even bother contacting Xerox. "They had already given us the laser printer," Stallman says. "Why should I bug them for more?"

When the desired files failed to surface, however, Stallman began to grow suspicious. The year before, Stallman had experienced a blow up with a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University. The student, Brian Reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting program dubbed Scribe. One of the first programs that gave a user the power to define fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network, the program was an early harbinger of HTML, the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. In 1979, Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain. To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions- "time bombs" in software-programmer parlance-that deactivated freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.

For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public domain, and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access.

As the weeks passed and his attempts to track down Xerox laser-printer source code hit a brick wall, Stallman began to sense a similar money-for-code scenario at work. Before Stallman could do or say anything about it, however, good news finally trickled in via the programmer grapevine. Word had it that a scientist at the computer-science department at Carnegie Mellon University had just departed a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Not only had the scientist worked on the laser printer in question, but according to rumor, he was still working on it as part of his research duties at Carnegie Mellon.

Casting aside his initial suspicion, Stallman made a firm resolution to seek out the person in question during his next visit to the Carnegie Mellon campus.

He didn't have to wait long. Carnegie Mellon also had a lab specializing in artificial-intelligence research, and within a few months, Stallman had a business-related reason to visit the Carnegie Mellon campus. During that visit, he made sure to stop by the computer-science department. Department employees directed him to the office of the faculty member leading the Xerox project. When Stallman reached the office, he found the professor working there.

In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could port it to the PDP-11. To his surprise, the professor refused to grant his request.

"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.

Memory is a funny thing. Twenty years after the fact, Stallman's mental history tape is notoriously blank in places. Not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the trip or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection of the professor or doctoral student on the other end of the conversation. According to Reid, the person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request is Robert Sproull, a former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of Sun Laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology conglomerate Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had been the primary developer of the laser-printer software in question while at Xerox PARC. Around 1980, Sproull took a faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where he continued his laser-printer work amid other projects.

"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge, state-of-the-art code that Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon," recalls Reid. "I suspect that Sproull had been at Carnegie Mellon less than a month before this request came in."

When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank. "I can't make a factual comment," writes Sproull via email. "I have absolutely no recollection of the incident."

With both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall key details-including whether the conversation even took place-it's hard to gauge the bluntness of Sproull's refusal, at least as recalled by Stallman. In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident, noting that Sproull's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between Sproull and the Xerox Corporation giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access to the software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it. "Xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane to give away the source code."

For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part of Xerox and Sproull, or whoever the person was that turned down his source-code request that day, to participate in a system that, until then, had encouraged software programmers to regard programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose centuries-old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam bearing the Xerox logo.

For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. At first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the refusal. As a person who felt awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face encounters, Stallman's attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness. Now that the request had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. "I was so angry I couldn't think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without another word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows? All I remember is wanting to get out of there."

Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that Stallman has elevated the event into a major turning point. Within the next few months, a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.

"It encouraged me to think about something that I'd already been thinking about," says Stallman. "I already had an idea that software should be shared, but I wasn't sure how to think about that. My thoughts weren't clear and organized to the point where I could express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world."

Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. As an elite programmer at one of the world's elite institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so long as they didn't interfere with his own work. Until the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the machines and programs other computer users grimly tolerated. On the rare occasion that such a program breached the AI Lab's walls-when the lab replaced its venerable Incompatible Time Sharing operating system with a commercial variant, the TOPS 20, for example-Stallman and his hacker colleagues had been free to rewrite, reshape, and rename the software according to personal taste.

Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab's network, however, something had changed. The machine worked fine, barring the occasional paper jam, but the ability to modify according to personal taste had disappeared. From the viewpoint of the entire software industry, the printer was a wake-up call. Software had become such a valuable asset that companies no longer felt the need to publicize source code, especially when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate something cheaply. From Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse. After a decade of failure, privately owned software-future hackers would use the term " proprietary" software-had gained a foothold inside the AI Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.

That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the necessary anger to view all future entreaties with suspicion, it also forced him to ask the uncomfortable question: what if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman's office someday and it suddenly became Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?

"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says Stallman, firmly. "In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I] were victims."

It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own. Because most nondisclosure aggreements (NDAs) had expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw a need for personal introspection. Sooner or later, they reasoned, the software would become public knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep the software secret during its earliest development stages was all a part of the compromise deal that allowed hackers to work on the best projects. For Stallman, however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.

"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab," Stallman says. "So I said, `Thank you very much for offering me this nice software package, but I can't accept it on the conditions that you're asking for, so I'm going to do without it.'"

As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more than personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste in a more morally flexible fashion. It wasn't long before Stallman, increasingly an outcast even within the AI Lab, began billing himself as "the last true hacker," isolating himself further and further from a marketplace dominated by proprietary software. Refusing another's request for source code, Stallman decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the riches of a commercial programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. There would have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren't addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as surely as any political ideology or ethical belief.

"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate in," says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake of convenience-Stallman's description of the NDA bargain-as well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place. "I decided never to make other people victims just like I had been a victim."

Endnote

For more on the term "hacker," see Appendix B.

Chapter 2: 2001: A Hacker's Odyssey

The New York University computer-science department sits inside Warren Weaver Hall, a fortress-like building located two blocks east of Washington Square Park. Industrial-strength air-conditioning vents create a surrounding moat of hot air, discouraging loiterers and solicitors alike. Visitors who breach the moat encounter another formidable barrier, a security check-in counter immediately inside the building's single entryway.

Beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes somewhat. Still, numerous signs scattered throughout the first floor preach the dangers of unsecured doors and propped-open fire exits. Taken as a whole, the signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil confines of pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can never be too careful or too suspicious.

The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing number of visitors gathering in the hall's interior atrium. A few look like NYU students. Most look like shaggy-aired concert-goers milling outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act. For one brief morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver Hall, leaving the nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch Ricki Lake on TV and shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium whenever visitors ask about "the speech."

Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), corecipient of the Takeda Foundation's 2001 Takeda Award, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project's own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General Public License.

The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the General Public License, or GPL, a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.1

In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial "big stick." Even companies that once laughed it off as software socialism have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux, the Unix-like kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are many of the world's most popular programming tools: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of a free software operating system developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this community as a threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure.

They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community's perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that, for better or worse, has dominated the PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Almost every line of source code in the Windows colossus is protected by copyrights reaffirming the private nature of the underlying source code or, at the very least, reaffirming Microsoft's legal ability to treat it as such. From the Microsoft viewpoint, incorporating programs protected by the "viral" GPL into the Windows colossus would be the software equivalent of Superman downing a bottle of Kryptonite pills. Rival companies could suddenly copy, modify, and sell improved versions of Windows, rendering the company's indomitable position as the No. 1 provider of consumer-oriented software instantly vulnerable. Hence the company's growing concern over the GPL's rate of adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the GPL and the " open source" approach to software development and sales. And hence Stallman's decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today.

20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in 1980, when Richard Stallman was cursing the AI Lab's Xerox laser printer, Microsoft, the company modern hackers view as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. IBM, the company then regarded as the most powerful force in the computer hardware industry, had yet to introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now take for granted-the World Wide Web, satellite television, 32-bit video-game consoles-didn't even exist. The same goes for many of the companies that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment, companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Compaq, and Dell. The list goes on and on.

The fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is fuel for both sides of the GPL debate. GPL-proponents point to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.2 The current, privately owned software environment, GPL-proponents say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups.

GPL-opponents argue just the opposite. Selling software is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. Without the legal guarantees provided by private software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a breakthrough technology that launches an entirely new market),3 companies lose the incentive to participate. Once again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As Mundie himself noted in his May 3 address on the same campus, the GPL's "viral" nature "poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie:

It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.4 The mutual success of GNU/ Linux, the amalgamated operating system built around the GPL-protected Linux kernel, and Windows over the last 10 years reveals the wisdom of both perspectives. Nevertheless, the battle for momentum is an important one in the software industry. Even powerful vendors such as Microsoft rely on the support of third-party software developers whose tools, programs, and computer games make an underlying software platform such as Windows more attractive to the mainstream consumer. Citing the rapid evolution of the technology marketplace over the last 20 years, not to mention his own company's admirable track record during that period, Mundie advised listeners to not get too carried away by the free software movement's recent momentum: Two decades of experience have shown that an economic model that protects intellectual property and a business model that recoups research and development costs can create impressive economic benefits and distribute them very broadly.4

Such admonitions serve as the backdrop for Stallman's speech today. Less than a month after their utterance, Stallman stands with his back to one of the chalk boards at the front of the room, edgy to begin.

If the last two decades have brought dramatic changes to the software marketplace, they have brought even more dramatic changes to Stallman himself. Gone is the skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his entire days communing with his beloved PDP-10. In his place stands a heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and rabbinical beard, a man who now spends the bulk of his time writing and answering email, haranguing fellow programmers, and giving speeches like the one today. Dressed in an aqua-colored T-shirt and brown polyester pants, Stallman looks like a desert hermit who just stepped out of a Salvation Army dressing room.

The crowd is filled with visitors who share Stallman's fashion and grooming tastes. Many come bearing laptop computers and cellular modems, all the better to record and transmit Stallman's words to a waiting Internet audience. The gender ratio is roughly 15 males to 1 female, and 1 of the 7 or 8 females in the room comes in bearing a stuffed penguin, the official Linux mascot, while another carries a stuffed teddy bear.

Richard Stallman, circa 2000. "I decided I would develop a free software operating system or die trying . . . of old age of course." Photo courtesy of http://www.stallman.org.

Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a seat in a front-row chair, tapping a few commands into an already-opened laptop. For the next 10 minutes Stallman is oblivious to the growing number of students, professors, and fans circulating in front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage.

Before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of academic formality must be observed. Stallman's appearance merits not one but two introductions. Mike Uretsky, codirector of the Stern School's Center for Advanced Technology, provides the first.

"The role of a university is to foster debate and to have interesting discussions," Uretsky says. "This particular presentation, this seminar falls right into that mold. I find the discussion of open source particularly interesting."

Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist.

"I do free software," Stallman says to rising laughter. "Open source is a different movement."

The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked with Stallman partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for Jack Benny's trademark, "Now cut that out!" phrase during each radio program.

Uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the stage to Edmond Schonberg, a professor in the NYU computer-science department. As a computer programmer and GNU Project contributor, Schonberg knows which linguistic land mines to avoid. He deftly summarizes Stallman's career from the perspective of a modern-day programmer.

"Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally [about] problems concerning the unavailability of source code," says Schonberg. "He has developed a coherent philosophy that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and of what the software community actually represents."

Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his chair, and takes the stage.

At first, Stallman's address seems more Catskills comedy routine than political speech. "I'd like to thank Microsoft for providing me the opportunity to be on this platform," Stallman wisecracks. "For the past few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banned somewhere."

For the uninitiated, Stallman dives into a quick free software warm-up analogy. He likens a software program to a cooking recipe. Both provide useful step-by-step instructions on how to complete a desired task and can be easily modified if a user has special desires or circumstances. "You don't have to follow a recipe exactly," Stallman notes. "You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt-whatever."

Most importantly, Stallman says, software programs and recipes are both easy to share. In giving a recipe to a dinner guest, a cook loses little more than time and the cost of the paper the recipe was written on. Software programs require even less, usually a few mouse-clicks and a modicum of electricity. In both instances, however, the person giving the information gains two things: increased friendship and the ability to borrow interesting recipes in return.

"Imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black boxes," Stallman says, shifting gears. "You couldn't see what ingredients they're using, let alone change them, and imagine if you made a copy for a friend. They would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. That world would create tremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes. But that is exactly what the world of proprietary software is like. A world in which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented."

With this introductory analogy out of the way, Stallman launches into a retelling of the Xerox laser-printer episode. Like the recipe analogy, the laser-printer story is a useful rhetorical device. With its parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly things can change in the software world. Drawing listeners back to an era before Amazon.com one-click shopping, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle databases, it asks the listener to examine the notion of software ownership free of its current corporate logos.

Stallman delivers the story with all the polish and practice of a local district attorney conducting a closing argument. When he gets to the part about the Carnegie Mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy of the printer source code, Stallman pauses.

"He had betrayed us," Stallman says. "But he didn't just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you."

On the word "you," Stallman points his index finger accusingly at an unsuspecting member of the audience. The targeted audience member's eyebrows flinch slightly, but Stallman's own eyes have moved on. Slowly and deliberately, Stallman picks out a second listener to nervous titters from the crowd. "And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you, too," he says, pointing at an audience member three rows behind the first.

By the time Stallman has a third audience member picked out, the titters have given away to general laughter. The gesture seems a bit staged, because it is. Still, when it comes time to wrap up the Xerox laser-printer story, Stallman does so with a showman's flourish. "He probably did it to most of the people here in this room-except a few, maybe, who weren't born yet in 1980," Stallman says, drawing more laughs. "[That's] because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the planet Earth."

Stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. "He had signed a nondisclosure agreement," Stallman adds.

Richard Matthew Stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political leader over the last 20 years speaks to many things. It speaks to Stallman's stubborn nature and prodigious will. It speaks to the clearly articulated vision and values of the free software movement Stallman helped build. It speaks to the high-quality software programs Stallman has built, programs that have cemented Stallman's reputation as a programming legend. It speaks to the growing momentum of the GPL, a legal innovation that many Stallman observers see as his most momentous accomplishment.

Most importantly, it speaks to the changing nature of political power in a world increasingly beholden to computer technology and the software programs that power that technology.

Maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on the wane, Stallman's star has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in 1984,5 Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized, vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software movement. Through it all, the GNU Project has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the free software ideology, an ideology meticulously groomed by Stallman himself.

To understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. The Richard Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's Stallman.

"I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the human being, you really need to see all of the parts as a consistent whole," advises Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and professor of law at Columbia University Law School. "All those personal eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to getting to know Stallman really are Stallman: Richard's strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability to compromise, especially on issues he considers fundamental. These are all the very reasons Richard did what he did when he did."

Explaining how a journey that started with a laser printer would eventually lead to a sparring match with the world's richest corporation is no easy task. It requires a thoughtful examination of the forces that have made software ownership so important in today's society. It also requires a thoughtful examination of a man who, like many political leaders before him, understands the malleability of human memory. It requires an ability to interpret the myths and politically laden code words that have built up around Stallman over time. Finally, it requires an understanding of Stallman's genius as a programmer and his failures and successes in translating that genius to other pursuits.

When it comes to offering his own summary of the journey, Stallman acknowledges the fusion of personality and principle observed by Moglen. "Stubbornness is my strong suit," he says. "Most people who attempt to do anything of any great difficulty eventually get discouraged and give up. I never gave up."

He also credits blind chance. Had it not been for that run-in over the Xerox laser printer, had it not been for the personal and political conflicts that closed out his career as an MIT employee, had it not been for a half dozen other timely factors, Stallman finds it very easy to picture his life following a different career path. That being said, Stallman gives thanks to the forces and circumstances that put him in the position to make a difference.

"I had just the right skills," says Stallman, summing up his decision for launching the GNU Project to the audience. "Nobody was there but me, so I felt like, `I'm elected. I have to work on this. If not me , who?'"

Endnotes

Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software Foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the GPL would replace.

If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.

"To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting."

For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.

See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gigalaw.com (January, 2000). http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2000-all/ghosh-2000-01-all.html

Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Witness, of course, the legendary Mosaic browser, a program whose copyright permits noncommercial derivatives with certain restrictions. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. The bigger the potential payoff, the more people want to participate. For a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David, "Whatever Happened to the `Killer App'?" e-Commerce News (December 7, 2000). http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/5893.html

See Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from an online transcript of Mundie's May 3, 2001, speech to the New York University Stern School of Business.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp

The acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin:

We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program . . . I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That was it.

Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new"). Not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the African antelope, Connochaetes gnou, it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any more," Stallman says.

Source: author notes and online transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation," Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University. http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

Chapter 3:A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man

Richard Stallman's mother, Alice Lippman, still remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift.

"I think it was when he was eight," Lippman recalls.

The year was 1961, and Lippman, a recently divorced single mother, was wiling away a weekend afternoon within the family's tiny one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Leafing through a copy of Scientific American, Lippman came upon her favorite section, the Martin Gardner-authored column titled "Mathematical Games." A substitute art teacher at the time, Lippman enjoyed Gardner's column for the brain-teasers it provided. With her son already ensconced in a book on the nearby sofa, Lippman decided to take a crack at solving the week's feature puzzle.

"I wasn't the best person when it came to solving the puzzles," she admits. "But as an artist, I found they really helped me work through conceptual barriers."

Lippman says her attempt to solve the puzzle met an immediate brick wall. About to throw the magazine down in disgust, Lippman was surprised by a gentle tug on her shirt sleeve.

"It was Richard," she recalls, "He wanted to know if I needed any help."

Looking back and forth, between the puzzle and her son, Lippman says she initially regarded the offer with skepticism. "I asked Richard if he'd read the magazine," she says. "He told me that, yes, he had and what's more he'd already solved the puzzle. The next thing I know, he starts explaining to me how to solve it."

Hearing the logic of her son's approach, Lippman's skepticism quickly gave way to incredulity. "I mean, I always knew he was a bright boy," she says, "but this was the first time I'd seen anything that suggested how advanced he really was."

Thirty years after the fact, Lippman punctuates the memory with a laugh. "To tell you the truth, I don't think I ever figured out how to solve that puzzle," she says. "All I remember is being amazed he knew the answer."

Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan apartment-the same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased-Alice Lippman exudes a Jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her son's early years. The nearby dining-room credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of Stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. The image dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman's nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, Lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack.

"Richard insisted I have it after he received his honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow," says Lippman. "He said to me, `Guess what, mom? It's the first graduation I ever attended.'"1

Such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes with raising a child prodigy. Make no mistake, for every story Lippman hears and reads about her son's stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at least a dozen in return.

"He used to be so conservative," she says, throwing up her hands in mock exasperation. "We used to have the worst arguments right here at this table. I was part of the first group of public city school teachers that struck to form a union, and Richard was very angry with me. He saw unions as corrupt. He was also very opposed to social security. He thought people could make much more money investing it on their own. Who knew that within 10 years he would become so idealistic? All I remember is his stepsister coming to me and saying, `What is he going to be when he grows up? A fascist?'"

As a single parent for nearly a decade-she and Richard's father, Daniel Stallman, were married in 1948, divorced in 1958, and split custody of their son afterwards-Lippman can attest to her son's aversion to authority. She can also attest to her son's lust for knowledge. It was during the times when the two forces intertwined, Lippman says, that she and her son experienced their biggest battles.

"It was like he never wanted to eat," says Lippman, recalling the behavior pattern that set in around age eight and didn't let up until her son's high-school graduation in 1970. "I'd call him for dinner, and he'd never hear me. I'd have to call him 9 or 10 times just to get his attention. He was totally immersed."

Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar fashion, albeit with a political twist.

"I enjoyed reading," he says. "If I wanted to read, and my mother told me to go to the kitchen and eat or go to sleep, I wasn't going to listen. I saw no reason why I couldn't read. No reason why she should be able to tell me what to do, period. Essentially, what I had read about, ideas such as democracy and individual freedom, I applied to myself. I didn't see any reason to exclude children from these principles."

The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary authority extended to school as well. Two years ahead of his classmates by age 11, Stallman endured all the usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student. It wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his mother attended the first in what would become a long string of parent-teacher conferences.

"He absolutely refused to write papers," says Lippman, recalling an early controversy. "I think the last paper he wrote before his senior year in high school was an essay on the history of the number system in the west for a fourth-grade teacher."

Gifted in anything that required analytical thinking, Stallman gravitated toward math and science at the expense of his other studies. What some teachers saw as single-mindedness, however, Lippman saw as impatience. Math and science offered simply too much opportunity to learn, especially in comparison to subjects and pursuits for which her son seemed less naturally inclined. Around age 10 or 11, when the boys in Stallman's class began playing a regular game of touch football, she remembers her son coming home in a rage. "He wanted to play so badly, but he just didn't have the coordination skills," Lippman recalls. "It made him so angry."

The anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and science all the more. Even in the realm of science, however, her son's impatience could be problematic. Poring through calculus textbooks by age seven, Stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for adults. Sometime, during his middle-school years, Lippman hired a student from nearby Columbia University to play big brother to her son. The student left the family's apartment after the first session and never came back. "I think what Richard was talking about went over his head," Lippman speculates.

Another favorite maternal memory dates back to the early 1960s, shortly after the puzzle incident. Around age seven, two years after the divorce and relocation from Queens, Richard took up the hobby of launching model rockets in nearby Riverside Drive Park. What started as aimless fun soon took on an earnest edge as her son began recording the data from each launch. Like the interest in mathematical games, the pursuit drew little attention until one day, just before a major NASA launch, Lippman checked in on her son to see if he wanted to watch.

"He was fuming," Lippman says. "All he could say to me was, `But I'm not published yet.' Apparently he had something that he really wanted to show NASA."

Such anecdotes offer early evidence of the intensity that would become Stallman's chief trademark throughout life. When other kids came to the table, Stallman stayed in his room and read. When other kids played Johnny Unitas, Stallman played Werner von Braun. "I was weird," Stallman says, summing up his early years succinctly in a 1999 interview. "After a certain age, the only friends I had were teachers."1

Although it meant courting more run-ins at school, Lippman decided to indulge her son's passion. By age 12, Richard was attending science camps during the summer and private school during the school year. When a teacher recommended her son enroll in the Columbia Science Honors Program, a post-Sputnik program designed for gifted middle- and high-school students in New York City, Stallman added to his extracurriculars and was soon commuting uptown to the Columbia University campus on Saturdays.

Dan Chess, a fellow classmate in the Columbia Science Honors Program, recalls Richard Stallman seeming a bit weird even among the students who shared a similar lust for math and science. "We were all geeks and nerds, but he was unusually poorly adjusted," recalls Chess, now a mathematics professor at Hunter College. "He was also smart as shit. I've known a lot of smart people, but I think he was the smartest person I've ever known."

Seth Breidbart, a fellow Columbia Science Honors Program alumnus, offers bolstering testimony. A computer programmer who has kept in touch with Stallman thanks to a shared passion for science fiction and science-fiction conventions, he recalls the 15-year-old, buzz-cut-wearing Stallman as "scary," especially to a fellow 15-year-old.

"It's hard to describe," Breidbart says. "It wasn't like he was unapproachable. He was just very intense. [He was] very knowledgeable but also very hardheaded in some ways."

Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral disorder? A December, 2001, Wired magazine article titled "The Geek Syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Even Stallman has indulged in psychiatric revisionism from time to time. During a 2000 profile for the Toronto Star, Stallman described himself to an interviewer as "borderline autistic,"2 a description that goes a long way toward explaining a lifelong tendency toward social and emotional isolation and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it.

Such speculation benefits from the fast and loose nature of most so-called " behavioral disorders" nowadays, of course. As Steve Silberman, author of " The Geek Syndrome," notes, American psychiatrists have only recently come to accept Asperger Syndrome as a valid umbrella term covering a wide set of behavioral traits. The traits range from poor motor skills and poor socialization to high intelligence and an almost obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered systems.3 Reflecting on the broad nature of this umbrella, Stallman says its possible that, if born 40 years later, he might have merited just such a diagnosis. Then again, so would many of his computer-world colleagues.

"It's possible I could have had something like that," he says. "On the other hand, one of the aspects of that syndrome is difficulty following rhythms. I can dance. In fact, I love following the most complicated rhythms. It's not clear cut enough to know."

Chess, for one, rejects such attempts at back-diagnosis. "I never thought of him [as] having that sort of thing," he says. "He was just very unsocialized, but then, we all were."

Lippman, on the other hand, entertains the possibility. She recalls a few stories from her son's infancy, however, that provide fodder for speculation. A prominent symptom of autism is an oversensitivity to noises and colors, and Lippman recalls two anecdotes that stand out in this regard. "When Richard was an infant, we'd take him to the beach," she says. "He would start screaming two or three blocks before we reached the surf. It wasn't until the third time that we figured out what was going on: the sound of the surf was hurting his ears." She also recalls a similar screaming reaction in relation to color: "My mother had bright red hair, and every time she'd stoop down to pick him up, he'd let out a wail."

In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading books about autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. "I do feel that Richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child," she says. "I regret that so little was known about autism back then."

Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to adjust. By age seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of railroad tracks underneath the city. It was a hobby that relied on an ability to accommodate the loud noises that accompanied each train ride. "Only the initial noise seemed to bother him," says Lippman. "It was as if he got shocked by the sound but his nerves learned how to make the adjustment."

For the most part, Lippman recalls her son exhibiting the excitement, energy, and social skills of any normal boy. It wasn't until after a series of traumatic events battered the Stallman household, she says, that her son became introverted and emotionally distant.

The first traumatic event was the divorce of Alice and Daniel Stallman, Richard's father. Although Lippman says both she and her ex-husband tried to prepare their son for the blow, she says the blow was devastating nonetheless. "He sort of didn't pay attention when we first told him what was happening," Lippman recalls. "But the reality smacked him in the face when he and I moved into a new apartment. The first thing he said was, `Where's Dad's furniture?'"

For the next decade, Stallman would spend his weekdays at his mother's apartment in Manhattan and his weekends at his father's home in Queens. The shuttling back and forth gave him a chance to study a pair of contrasting parenting styles that, to this day, leaves Stallman firmly opposed to the idea of raising children himself. Speaking about his father, a World War II vet who passed away in early 2001, Stallman balances respect with anger. On one hand, there is the man whose moral commitment led him to learn French just so he could be more helpful to Allies when they'd finally come. On the other hand, there was the parent who always knew how to craft a put-down for cruel effect.4

"My father had a horrible temper," Stallman says. "He never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way."

As for life in his mother's apartment, Stallman is less equivocal. "That was war," he says. "I used to say in my misery, `I want to go home,' meaning to the nonexistent place that I'll never have."

For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents. Then, around age 10 his grandparents passed away in short succession. For Stallman, the loss was devastating. "I used to go and visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment," Stallman recalls. "It was the only place I ever found one, until I went away to college."

Lippman lists the death of Richard's paternal grandparents as the second traumatic event. "It really upset him," she says. He was very close to both his grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing, almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids. After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn."

From Stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a "pure horror," Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.

"I often had the feeling that I couldn't understand what other people were saying," says Stallman, recalling the emotional bubble that insulated him from the rest of the adolescent and adult world. "I could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why people were interested in the things other people said."

For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have an encouraging effect on Stallman's sense of individuality. At a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, Mad magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman cultivated a distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the incomprehension of parents and peers alike.

"Oh, the puns," says Lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her son's teenage personality. "There wasn't a thing you could say at the dinner table that he couldn't throw back at you as a pun."

Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor who handed Stallman a print-out manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 12th year. To a preteenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.5 By the end of summer, Stallman was writing out paper programs according to the 7094's internal specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance to try them out on a real machine.

With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. His first chance finally came during his junior year of high school. Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094 written in the programming language PL/I. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer," he recalls.

After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, Stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller," Lippman says. "He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist."

Stallman's analytical skills impressed faculty members at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became a target of their ire. "Typically once or twice an hour [Stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture," says Breidbart. "And he was not shy about letting the professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of respect but not much popularity."

Hearing Breidbart's anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman. "I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes," he admits. "But I found kindred spirits among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. Kids, for the most part, didn't. At least not in the same way."

Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday nevertheless encouraged Stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization. With college fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down to two choices: Harvard and MIT. Hearing of her son's desire to move on to the Ivy League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and administrators. Only the year before, he had pulled straight A's in American History, Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. Such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at MIT, but at Harvard, they were a red flag.

During her son's junior year, Lippman says she scheduled an appointment with a therapist. The therapist expressed instant concern over Stallman's unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with teachers. Her son certainly had the intellectual wherewithal to succeed at Harvard, but did he have the patience to sit through college classes that required a term paper? The therapist suggested a trial run. If Stallman could make it through a full year in New York City public schools, including an English class that required term papers, he could probably make it at Harvard. Following the completion of his junior year, Stallman promptly enrolled in summer school at Louis D. Brandeis High School, a public school located on 84th Street, and began making up the mandatory art classes he had shunned earlier in his high-school career.

By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York City high-school students. It wasn't easy sitting through classes that seemed remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at Columbia, but Lippman recalls proudly her son's ability to toe the line.

"He was forced to kowtow to a certain degree, but he did it," Lippman says. "I only got called in once, which was a bit of a miracle. It was the calculus teacher complaining that Richard was interrupting his lesson. I asked how he was interrupting. He said Richard was always accusing the teacher of using a false proof. I said, `Well, is he right?' The teacher said, `Yeah, but I can't tell that to the class. They wouldn't understand.'"

By the end of his first semester at Brandeis, things were falling into place. A 96 in English wiped away much of the stigma of the 60 earned 2 years before. For good measure, Stallman backed it up with top marks in American History, Advanced Placement Calculus, and Microbiology. The crowning touch was a perfect 100 in Physics. Though still a social outcast, Stallman finished his 11 months at Brandeis as the fourth-ranked student in a class of 789.

Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies with even more diligence, rushing off to fulfill his laboratory-assistant duties at Rockefeller University during the week and dodging the Vietnam protesters on his way to Saturday school at Columbia. It was there, while the rest of the Science Honors Program students sat around discussing their college choices, that Stallman finally took a moment to participate in the preclass bull session.

Recalls Breidbart, "Most of the students were going to Harvard and MIT, of course, but you had a few going to other Ivy League schools. As the conversation circled the room, it became apparent that Richard hadn't said anything yet. I don't know who it was, but somebody got up the courage to ask him what he planned to do."

Thirty years later, Breidbart remembers the moment clearly. As soon as Stallman broke the news that he, too, would be attending Harvard University in the fall, an awkward silence filled the room. Almost as if on cue, the corners of Stallman's mouth slowly turned upward into a self-satisfied smile.

Says Breidbart, "It was his silent way of saying, `That's right. You haven't got rid of me yet.'"

Endnotes

One of the major background sources for this chapter was the interview "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius" by Michael Gross, author of the 1999 book Talking About My Generation, a collection of interviews with notable personalities from the so-called "Baby Boom" generation. Although Stallman did not make it into the book, Gross published the interview as an online supplement to the book's website. The URL for the interview has changed several times since I first came across it. According to various readers who have gone searching for it, you can now find the interview at http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html

See Judy Steed, Toronto Star, BUSINESS, (October 9, 2000): C03.

His vision of free software and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people. See Steve Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome," Wired (December, 2001). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html

Regrettably, I did not get a chance to interview Daniel Stallman for this book. During the early research for this book, Stallman informed me that his father suffered from Alzheimer's. When I resumed research in late 2001, I learned, sadly, that Daniel Stallman had died earlier in the year.

Stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this description. Suffice it to say, it was something Stallman welcomed. See previous note 1: "As soon as I heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play with one."

Chapter 4: Impeach God

Although their relationship was fraught with tension, Richard Stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait from his mother: a passion for progressive politics. It was an inherited trait that would take several decades to emerge, however. For the first few years of his life, Stallman lived in what he now admits was a "political vacuum."1 Like most Americans during the Eisenhower age, the Stallman family spent the Fifties trying to recapture the normalcy lost during the wartime years of the 1940s.

"Richard's father and I were Democrats but happy enough to leave it at that," says Lippman, recalling the family's years in Queens. "We didn't get involved much in local or national politics."

That all began to change, however, in the late 1950s when Alice divorced Daniel Stallman. The move back to Manhattan represented more than a change of address; it represented a new, independent identity and a jarring loss of tranquility.

"I think my first taste of political activism came when I went to the Queens public library and discovered there was only a single book on divorce in the whole library," recalls Lippman. "It was very controlled by the Catholic church, at least in Elmhurst, where we lived. I think that was the first inkling I had of the forces that quietly control our lives."

Returning to her childhood neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper West Side, Lippman was shocked by the changes that had taken place since her departure to Hunter College a decade and a half before. The skyrocketing demand for postwar housing had turned the neighborhood into a political battleground. On one side stood the pro-development city-hall politicians and businessmen hoping to rebuild many of the neighborhood's blocks to accommodate the growing number of white-collar workers moving into the city. On the other side stood the poor Irish and Puerto Rican tenants who had found an affordable haven in the neighborhood.

At first, Lippman didn't know which side to choose. As a new resident, she felt the need for new housing. As a single mother with minimal income, however, she shared the poorer tenants' concern over the growing number of development projects catering mainly to wealthy residents. Indignant, Lippman began looking for ways to combat the political machine that was attempting to turn her neighborhood into a clone of the Upper East Side.

Lippman says her first visit to the local Democratic party headquarters came in 1958. Looking for a day-care center to take care of her son while she worked, she had been appalled by the conditions encountered at one of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income residents. "All I remember is the stench of rotten milk, the dark hallways, the paucity of supplies. I had been a teacher in private nursery schools. The contrast was so great. We took one look at that room and left. That stirred me up."

The visit to the party headquarters proved disappointing, however. Describing it as "the proverbial smoke-filled room," Lippman says she became aware for the first time that corruption within the party might actually be the reason behind the city's thinly disguised hostility toward poor residents. Instead of going back to the headquarters, Lippman decided to join up with one of the many clubs aimed at reforming the Democratic party and ousting the last vestiges of the Tammany Hall machine. Dubbed the Woodrow Wilson/FDR Reform Democratic Club, Lippman and her club began showing up at planning and city-council meetings, demanding a greater say.

"Our primary goal was to fight Tammany Hall, Carmine DeSapio and his henchman,"2 says Lippman. "I was the representative to the city council and was very much involved in creating a viable urban-renewal plan that went beyond simply adding more luxury housing to the neighborhood."

Such involvement would blossom into greater political activity during the 1960s. By 1965, Lippman had become an "outspoken" supporter for political candidates like William Fitts Ryan, a Democrat elected to Congress with the help of reform clubs and one of the first U.S. representatives to speak out against the Vietnam War.

It wasn't long before Lippman, too, was an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Indochina. "I was against the Vietnam war from the time Kennedy sent troops," she says. "I had read the stories by reporters and journalists sent to cover the early stages of the conflict. I really believed their forecast that it would become a quagmire."

Such opposition permeated the Stallman-Lippman household. In 1967, Lippman remarried. Her new husband, Maurice Lippman, a major in the Air National Guard, resigned his commission to demonstrate his opposition to the war. Lippman's stepson, Andrew Lippman, was at MIT and temporarily eligible for a student deferment. Still, the threat of induction should that deferment disappear, as it eventually did, made the risk of U.S. escalation all the more immediate. Finally, there was Richard who, though younger, faced the prospect of choosing between Vietnam or Canada when the war lasted into the 1970s.

"Vietnam was a major issue in our household," says Lippman. "We talked about it constantly: what would we do if the war continued, what steps Richard or his stepbrother would take if they got drafted. We were all opposed to the war and the draft. We really thought it was immoral."

For Stallman, the Vietnam War elicited a complex mixture of emotions: confusion, horror, and, ultimately, a profound sense of political impotence. As a kid who could barely cope in the mild authoritarian universe of private school, Stallman experienced a shiver whenever the thought of Army boot camp presented itself.

"I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn't imagine what to do and didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls Stallman, whose March 18th birthday earned him a dreaded low number in the draft lottery when the federal government finally eliminated college deferments in 1971. "I couldn't envision moving to Canada or Sweden. The idea of getting up by myself and moving somewhere. How could I do that? I didn't know how to live by myself. I wasn't the kind of person who felt confident in approaching things like that."

Stallman says he was both impressed and shamed by the family members who did speak out. Recalling a bumper sticker on his father's car likening the My Lai massacre to similar Nazi atrocities in World War II, he says he was "excited" by his father's gesture of outrage. "I admired him for doing it," Stallman says. "But I didn't imagine that I could do anything. I was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was going to destroy me."

Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.3 Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock 'n' roll, detested drugs, and didn't participate in campus demonstrations, wasn't getting it politically; he wasn't "getting it" sexually either.

"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman admits. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."

Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.

In 1970, Stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations about politics and the Vietnam War as he departed for Harvard. Looking back, Stallman describes the transition from his mother's Manhattan apartment to life in a Cambridge dorm as an "escape." Peers who watched Stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience.

"He seemed pretty miserable for the first while at Harvard," recalls Dan Chess, a classmate in the Science Honors Program who also matriculated at Harvard. "You could tell that human interaction was really difficult for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at Harvard. Harvard was an intensely social kind of place."

To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP."

To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.

"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.

"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. Except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's a function. It's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. That's just the way he was."

It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."

For Chess, it was a troubling moment. Like a bird flying into a clear glass window, it would take a while to realize that some levels of insight were simply off limits.

"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."

For Stallman, success in the classroom was balanced by the same lack of success in the social arena. Even as other members of the math mafia gathered to take on the Math 55 problem sets, Stallman preferred to work alone. The same went for living arrangements. On the housing application for Harvard, Stallman clearly spelled out his preferences. "I said I preferred an invisible, inaudible, intangible roommate," he says. In a rare stroke of bureaucratic foresight, Harvard's housing office accepted the request, giving Stallman a one-room single for his freshman year.

Breidbart, the only math-mafia member to share a dorm with Stallman that freshman year, says Stallman slowly but surely learned how to interact with other students. He recalls how other dorm mates, impressed by Stallman's logical acumen, began welcoming his input whenever an intellectual debate broke out in the dining club or dorm commons.

"We had the usual bull sessions about solving the world's problems or what would be the result of something," recalls Breidbart. "Say somebody discovers an immortality serum. What do you do? What are the political results? If you give it to everybody, the world gets overcrowded and everybody dies. If you limit it, if you say everyone who's alive now can have it but their children can't, then you end up with an underclass of people without it. Richard was just better able than most to see the unforeseen circumstances of any decision."

Stallman remembers the discussions vividly. "I was always in favor of immortality," he says. "I was shocked that most people regarded immortality as a bad thing. How else would we be able to see what the world is like 200 years from now?"

Although a first-rank mathematician and first-rate debater, Stallman shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have sealed his brilliant reputation. Near the end of freshman year at Harvard, Breidbart recalls how Stallman conspicuously ducked the Putnam exam, a prestigious test open to math students throughout the U.S. and Canada. In addition to giving students a chance to measure their knowledge in relation to their peers, the Putnam served as a chief recruiting tool for academic math departments. According to campus legend, the top scorer automatically qualified for a graduate fellowship at any school of his choice, including Harvard.

Like Math 55, the Putnam was a brutal test of merit. A six-hour exam in two parts, it seemed explicitly designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Breidbart, a veteran of both the Science Honors Program and Math 55, describes it as easily the most difficult test he ever took. "Just to give you an idea of how difficult it was," says Breidbart, "the top score was a 120, and my score the first year was in the 30s. That score was still good enough to place me 101st in the country."

Surprised that Stallman, the best student in the class, had passed on the test, Breidbart says he and a fellow classmate cornered him in the dining common and demanded an explanation. "He said he was afraid of not doing well," Breidbart recalls.

Breidbart and the friend quickly wrote down a few problems from memory and gave them to Stallman. "He solved all of them," Breidbart says, "leading me to conclude that by not doing well, he either meant coming in second or getting something wrong."

Stallman remembers the episode a bit differently. "I remember that they did bring me the questions and it's possible that I solved one of them, but I'm pretty sure I didn't solve them all," he says. Nevertheless, Stallman agrees with Breidbart's recollection that fear was the primary reason for not taking the test. Despite a demonstrated willingness to point out the intellectual weaknesses of his peers and professors in the classroom, Stallman hated the notion of head-to-head competition.

"It's the same reason I never liked chess," says Stallman. "Whenever I'd play, I would become so consumed by the fear of making a single mistake that I would start making stupid mistakes very early in the game. The fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Whether such fears ultimately prompted Stallman to shy away from a mathematical career is a moot issue. By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Stallman had other interests pulling him away from the field. Computer programming, a latent fascination throughout Stallman's high-school years, was becoming a full-fledged passion. Where other math students sought occasional refuge in art and history classes, Stallman sought it in the computer-science laboratory.

For Stallman, the first taste of real computer programming at the IBM New York Scientific Center had triggered a desire to learn more. "Toward the end of my first year at Harvard school, I started to have enough courage to go visit computer labs and see what they had. I'd ask them if they had extra copies of any manuals that I could read."

Taking the manuals home, Stallman would examine machine specifications, compare them with other machines he already knew, and concoct a trial program, which he would then bring back to the lab along with the borrowed manual. Although some labs balked at the notion of a strange kid coming off the street and working on the lab machinery, most recognized competence when they saw it and let Stallman run the programs he had created.

One day, near the end of his freshman year, Stallman heard about a special laboratory near MIT. The laboratory was located on the ninth floor of an off-campus building in Tech Square, the newly built facility dedicated to advanced research. According to the rumors, the lab itself was dedicated to the cutting-edge science of artificial intelligence and boasted the cutting-edge machines and software programs to match.

Intrigued, Stallman decided to pay a visit.

The trip was short, about 2 miles on foot, 10 minutes by train, but as Stallman would soon find out, MIT and Harvard can feel like opposite poles of the same planet. With its maze-like tangle of interconnected office buildings, the Institute's campus offered an aesthetic yin to Harvard's spacious colonial-village yang. The same could be said for the student body, a geeky collection of ex-high school misfits known more for its predilection for pranks than its politically powerful alumni.

The yin-yang relationship extended to the AI Lab as well. Unlike Harvard computer labs, there was no grad-student gatekeeper, no clipboard waiting list for terminal access, no explicit atmosphere of "look but don't touch." Instead, Stallman found only a collection of open terminals and robotic arms, presumably the artifacts of some A.I. experiment.

Although the rumors said anybody could sit down at the terminals, Stallman decided to stick with the original plan. When he encountered a lab employee, he asked if the lab had any spare manuals it could loan to an inquisitive student. "They had some, but a lot of things weren't documented," Stallman recalls. "They were hackers after all."

Stallman left with something even better than a manual: A job. Although he doesn't remember what the first project was, he does remember coming back to the AI Lab the next week, grabbing an open terminal and writing software code.

Looking back, Stallman sees nothing unusual in the AI Lab's willingness to accept an unproven outsider at first glance. "That's the way it was back then," he says. "That's the way it still is now. I'll hire somebody when I meet him if I see he's good. Why wait? Stuffy people who insist on putting bureaucracy into everything really miss the point. If a person is good, he shouldn't have to go through a long, detailed hiring process; he should be sitting at a computer writing code."

To get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," Stallman need only visit the computer labs at Harvard. There, access to the terminals was doled out according to academic rank. As an undergrad, Stallman usually had to sign up or wait until midnight, about the time most professors and grad students finished their daily work assignments. The waiting wasn't difficult, but it was frustrating. Waiting for a public terminal, knowing all the while that a half dozen equally usable machines were sitting idle inside professors' locked offices, seemed the height of illogic. Although Stallman paid the occasional visit to the Harvard computer labs, he preferred the more egalitarian policies of the AI Lab. "It was a breath of fresh air," he says. "At the AI Lab, people seemed more concerned about work than status."

Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded research program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the computer chess program that had once humbled A.I. critic Hubert Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE.4

Members of the tight-knit group called themselves " hackers." Over time, they extended the "hacker" description to Stallman as well. In the process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the "hacker ethic ." To be a hacker meant more than just writing programs, Stallman learned. It meant writing the best possible programs. It meant sitting at a terminal for 36 hours straight if that's what it took to write the best possible programs. Most importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and the most useful information at all times. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior.

Stallman also learned the lore, stories of how hackers, when presented with an obstacle, had circumvented it in creative ways. Stallman learned about " lock hacking," the art of breaking into professors' offices to "liberate" sequestered terminals. Unlike their pampered Harvard counterparts, MIT faculty members knew better than to treat the AI Lab's terminal as private property. If a faculty member made the mistake of locking away a terminal for the night, hackers were quick to correct the error. Hackers were equally quick to send a message if the mistake repeated itself. "I was actually shown a cart with a heavy cylinder of metal on it that had been used to break down the door of one professor's office,"5 Stallman says.

Such methods, while lacking in subtlety, served a purpose. Although professors and administrators outnumbered hackers two-to-one inside the AI Lab, the hacker ethic prevailed. Indeed, by the time of Stallman's arrival at the AI Lab, hackers and the AI Lab administration had coevolved into something of a symbiotic relationship. In exchange for fixing the machines and keeping the software up and running, hackers earned the right to work on favorite pet projects. Often, the pet projects revolved around improving the machines and software programs even further. Like teenage hot-rodders, most hackers viewed tinkering with machines as its own form of entertainment.

Nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the operating system that powered the lab's central PDP-6 mini-computer. Dubbed ITS, short for the Incompatible Time Sharing system, the operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design. Hackers had built it as a protest to Project MAC's original operating system, the Compatible Time Sharing System, CTSS, and named it accordingly. At the time, hackers felt the CTSS design too restrictive, limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own internal architecture if needed. According to one legend passed down by hackers, the decision to build ITS had political overtones as well. Unlike CTSS, which had been designed for the IBM 7094, ITS was built specifically for the PDP-6. In letting hackers write the systems themselves, AI Lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would feel comfortable using the PDP-6. In the feudal world of academic research, the gambit worked. Although the PDP-6 was co-owned in conjunction with other departments, A.I. researchers soon had it to themselves.6

ITS boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn't offer for years, features such as multitasking, debugging, and full-screen editing capability. Using it and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman's arrival.6

As an apprentice hacker, Stallman quickly became enamored with ITS. Although forbidding to most newcomers, the program contained many built-in features that provided a lesson in software development to hacker apprentices such as himself.

"ITS had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine another," says Stallman, recalling the program. "You could examine all sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified way."

Using this feature, Stallman was able to watch how programs written by hackers processed instructions as they ran. Another favorite feature would allow the monitoring program to freeze the monitored program's job between instructions. In other operating systems, such a command would have resulted in half-computed gibberish or an automatic systems crash. In ITS, it provided yet another way to monitor the step-by-step performance.

"If you said, `Stop the job,' it would always be stopped in user mode. It would be stopped between two user-mode instructions, and everything about the job would be consistent for that point," Stallman says. "If you said, `Resume the job,' it would continue properly. Not only that, but if you were to change the status of the job and then change it back, everything would be consistent. There was no hidden status anywhere."

By the end of 1970, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of Stallman's weekly schedule. From Monday to Thursday, Stallman devoted his waking hours to his Harvard classes. As soon as Friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the T, heading down to MIT for the weekend. Stallman usually timed his arrival to coincide with the ritual food run. Joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for Chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the Harvard Bridge into nearby Boston. For the next two hours, he and his hacker colleagues would discuss everything from ITS to the internal logic of the Chinese language and pictograph system. Following dinner, the group would return to MIT and hack code until dawn.

For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience, suddenly hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food. "I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown," Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. "It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night."7

The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker worldview. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal responsibility. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the one breaking into locked offices, trying to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art of lock hacking. One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into a cane and attaching a loop of tape to the long end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the long end touched the door knob. Provided the adhesive on the tape held, a hacker could open the doorknob with a few sharp twists.

When Stallman tried the trick, he found it good but wanting in a few places. Getting the tape to stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman remembered that the hallway ceiling possessed tiles that could be slid away. Some hackers, in fact, had used the false ceiling as a way to get around locked doors, an approach that generally covered the perpetrator in fiberglass but got the job done.

Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away one of the panels and stood over the door jamb?

Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire, Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape, fastening a loop of adhesive tape at the base of the U. Standing over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the doorknob. Lifting the tape until the adhesive fastened, he then pulled on the left end of the tape, twisting the doorknob counter-clockwise. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of lock hacking.

"Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the door knob," says Stallman, recalling the lingering bugginess of the new method. "It took a little bit of balance to pull it off."

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."8

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."9

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.10 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.11 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 t