Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software Part 8

Although Stallman and the girlfriend later broke up, the story triggers an automatic question: for all the media imagery depicting him as a wild-eyed fanatic, is Richard Stallman really just a hopeless romantic, a wandering Quixote tilting at corporate windmills in an effort to impress some as-yet-unidentified Dulcinea?

"I wasn't really trying to be romantic," Stallman says, recalling the Alix story. "It was more of a teasing thing. I mean, it was romantic, but it was also teasing, you know? It would have been a delightful surprise."

For the first time all morning, Stallman smiles. I bring up the hand kissing. "Yes, I do do that,"

Stallman says. "I've found it's a way of offering some affection that a lot of women will enjoy. It's a chance to give some affection and to be appreciated for it."

Affection is a thread that runs clear through Richard Stallman's life, and he is painfully candid about it when questions arise. "There really hasn't been much affection in my life, except in my mind," he says.

Still, the discussion quickly grows awkward. After a few one-word replies, Stallman finally lifts up his menu, cutting off the inquiry.

"Would you like some s.h.i.+mai?" he asks.

When the food comes out, the conversation slaloms between the arriving courses. We discuss the oft-noted hacker affection for Chinese food, the weekly dinner runs into Boston's Chinatown district during Stallman's days as a staff programmer at the AI Lab, and the underlying logic of the Chinese language and its a.s.sociated writing system. Each thrust on my part elicits a well-informed parry on Stallman's part.

"I heard some people speaking Shanghainese the last time I was in China," Stallman says. "It was interesting to hear. It sounded quite different [from Mandarin]. I had them tell me some cognate words in Mandarin and Shanghainese. In some cases you can see the resemblance, but one question I was wondering about was whether tones would be similar. They're not. That's interesting to me, because there's a theory that the tones evolved from additional syllables that got lost and replaced. Their effect survives in the tone. If that's true, and I've seen claims that that happened within historic times, the dialects must have diverged before the loss of these final syllables."

The first dish, a plate of pan-fried turnip cakes, has arrived. Both Stallman and I take a moment to carve up the large rectangular cakes, which smell like boiled cabbage but taste like potato latkes fried in bacon.

I decide to bring up the outcast issue again, wondering if Stallman's teenage years conditioned him to take unpopular stands, most notably his uphill battle since 1994 to get computer users and the media to replace the popular term "Linux" with "GNU/Linux."

"I believe it did help me," Stallman says, chewing on a dumpling. "I have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. I think the reason is that I was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there wasn't anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads.

It wouldn't have made any difference. I'd still be just as rejected, so I didn't try."

Stallman points to his taste in music as a key example of his contrarian tendencies. As a teenager, when most of his high school cla.s.smates were listening to Motown and acid rock, Stallman preferred cla.s.sical music. The memory leads to a rare humorous episode from Stallman's middle-school years. Following the Beatles' 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, most of Stallman's cla.s.smates rushed out to purchase the latest Beatles alb.u.ms and singles. Right then and there, Stallman says, he made a decision to boycott the Fab Four.

"I liked some of the pre-Beatles popular music,"

Stallman says. "But I didn't like the Beatles. I especially disliked the wild way people reacted to them. It was like: who was going to have a Beatles a.s.sembly to adulate the Beatles the most?"

When his Beatles boycott failed to take hold, Stallman looked for other ways to point out the herd-mentality of his peers. Stallman says he briefly considered putting together a rock band himself dedicated to satirizing the Liverpool group.

"I wanted to call it Tokyo Rose and the j.a.panese Beetles."

Given his current love for international folk music, I ask Stallman if he had a similar affinity for Bob Dylan and the other folk musicians of the early 1960s.

Stallman shakes his head. "I did like Peter, Paul and Mary," he says. "That reminds me of a great filk."

When I ask for a definition of "filk," Stallman explains the concept. A filk, he says, is a popular song whose lyrics have been replaced with parody lyrics. The process of writing a filk is called filking, and it is a popular activity among hackers and science-fiction aficionados. Cla.s.sic filks include "On Top of Spaghetti," a rewrite of "On Top of Old Smokey,"

and "Yoda," filk-master "Weird" Al Yankovic's Star Wars-oriented rendition of the Kinks tune, "Lola."

Stallman asks me if I would be interested in hearing the folk filk. As soon as I say yes, Stallman's voice begins singing in an unexpectedly clear tone: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,If a woodchuck could chuck wood?How many poles could a polak lock,If a polak could lock poles?How many knees could a negro grow,If a negro could grow knees?The answer, my dear, is stick it in your ear.The answer is to stick it in your ear. The singing ends, and Stallman's lips curl into another child-like half smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.For more Stallman filks, visit http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html. To hear Stallman singing "The Free Software Song," visit http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html.

After a few moments of hesitation, I finally smile too.

"Do you want that last cornball?" Stallman asks, eyes twinkling. Before I can screw up the punch line, Stallman grabs the corn-encrusted dumpling with his two chopsticks and lifts it proudly. "Maybe I'm the one who should get the cornball," he says.

The food gone, our conversation a.s.sumes the dynamics of a normal interview. Stallman reclines in his chair and cradles a cup of tea in his hands. We resume talking about Napster and its relation to the free software movement. Should the principles of free software be extended to similar arenas such as music publis.h.i.+ng? I ask.

"It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."

When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical doc.u.ments. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. The final category involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such doc.u.ments would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable.

Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author.

Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it.

"It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful."

When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.

"That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers."

The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land t.i.tle doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."

The invocation of Jim Crow prompts another question.

How much influence or inspiration does Stallman draw from past political leaders? Like the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, his attempt to drive social change is based on an appeal to timeless values: freedom, justice, and fair play.

Stallman divides his attention between my a.n.a.logy and a particularly tangled strand of hair. When I stretch the a.n.a.logy to the point where I'm comparing Stallman with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stallman, after breaking off a split end and popping it into his mouth, cuts me off.

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

he says, chewing.

I suggest Malcolm X as another point of comparison.

Like the former Nation of Islam spokesperson, Stallman has built up a reputation for courting controversy, alienating potential allies, and preaching a message favoring self-sufficiency over cultural integration.

Chewing on another split end, Stallman rejects the comparison. "My message is closer to King's message,"

he says. "It's a universal message. It's a message of firm condemnation of certain practices that mistreat others. It's not a message of hatred for anyone. And it's not aimed at a narrow group of people. I invite anyone to value freedom and to have freedom."

Even so, a suspicious att.i.tude toward political alliances remains a fundamental Stallman character trait. In the case of his well-publicized distaste for the term "open source," the unwillingness to partic.i.p.ate in recent coalition-building projects seems understandable. As a man who has spent the last two decades stumping on the behalf of free software, Stallman's political capital is deeply invested in the term. Still, comments such as the "Han Solo" wisecrack at the 1999 LinuxWorld have only reinforced the Stallman's reputation in the software industry as a disgrunted mossback unwilling to roll with political or marketing trends.

"I admire and respect Richard for all the work he's done," says Red Hat president Robert Young, summing up Stallman's paradoxical political nature. "My only critique is that sometimes Richard treats his friends worse than his enemies."

Stallman's unwillingness to seek alliances seems equally perplexing when you consider his political interests outside of the free software movement. Visit Stallman's offices at MIT, and you instantly find a clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering civil-rights abuses around the globe. Visit his web site, and you'll find diatribes on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the War on Drugs, and the World Trade Organization.

Given his activist tendencies, I ask, why hasn't Stallman sought a larger voice? Why hasn't he used his visibility in the hacker world as a platform to boost rather than reduce his political voice.

Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates the question for a moment.

"I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom," he says. "Because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say that free software is as important as they are. It's the responsibility I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them."

Once again, Stallman presents his political activity as a function of personal confidence. Given the amount of time it has taken him to develop and hone the free software movement's core tenets, Stallman is hesitant to jump aboard any issues or trends that might transport him into uncharted territory.

"I wish I knew I how to make a major difference on those bigger issues, because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard and lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working on them and have gotten only so far," he says.

"But as I see it, while other people were defending against these big visible threats, I saw another threat that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against that threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was the only one there."

Chewing a final split end, Stallman suggests paying the check. Before the waiter can take it away, however, Stallman pulls out a white-colored dollar bill and throws it on the pile. The bill looks so clearly counterfeit, I can't help but pick it up and read it.

Sure enough, it is counterfeit. Instead of bearing the image of a George Was.h.i.+ngton or Abe Lincoln, the bill's front side bears the image of a cartoon pig. Instead of the United States of America, the banner above the pig reads "United Swines of Avarice." The bill is for zero dollars, and when the waiter picks up the money, Stallman makes sure to tug on his sleeve.

"I added an extra zero to your tip," Stallman says, yet another half smile creeping across his lips.

The waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of the bill, smiles and scurries away.

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

The Emacs Commune