Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams (read this if .TXT) 📗

Although not the first person to view software as public property, Stallman is guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the GPL. Given that fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine Richard Stallman’s legacy outside the current time frame. Will the GPL still be something software programmers use in the year 2102, or will it have long since fallen by the wayside? Will the term “free software” seem as politically quaint as “free silver”

does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later political events?

Predicting the future is risky sport, but most people, when presented with the question, seemed eager to bite.

“One hundred years from now, Richard and a couple of other people are going to deserve more than a footnote,” says Moglen. “They’re going to be viewed as the main line of the story.”

The “couple other people” Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters include John Gilmore, Stallman’s GPL

advisor and future founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a. Ted Nelson, author of the 1982 book, Literary Machines . Moglen says Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically significant, nonoverlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly considered to have coined the term “hypertext,” for identifying the predicament of information ownership in the digital age. Gilmore and Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for identifying the negative political effects of information control and building organizations-the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and the Free Software Foundation in the case of Stallman-to counteract those effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman’s activities as more personal and less political in nature.

“Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of unfree software were particularly clear to him at an early moment,” says Moglen. “This has a lot to do with Richard’s personality, which lots of people will, when writing about him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in Richard Stallman’s own life work.”

Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the irascible Stallman as something of a “mixed honor,” nevertheless seconds the Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore: My guess is that Stallman’s writings will stand up as well as Thomas Jefferson’s have; he’s a pretty clear writer and also clear on his principles … Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson will depend on whether the abstractions we call “civil rights” end up more important a hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call “software” or “technically imposed restrictions.”

Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore writes, is the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the GNU

Project. Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard within the software-development industry. All told, Gilmore says, this collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential than the GNU Project, the GPL License, or any particular software program developed by Stallman: Before the Internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on software, even among teams that know and trust each other.

Richard pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other. Richard didn’t build any of the basic tools for doing this (the TCP protocol, email lists, diff and patch, tar files, RCS or CVS or remote-CVS), but he used the ones that were available to form social groups of programmers who could effectively collaborate. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book, The Future of Ideas , is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars, Lessig sees the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called “digital commons,” the vast agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and telecommunication standards that have triggered the Internet’s exponential growth over the last three decades. Rather than connect Stallman with other Internet pioneers, men such as Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R. Licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale, Lessig sees Stallman’s impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, unique: [Stallman] changed the debate from is to ought. He made people see how much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward . .

. That said, I don’t quite know how to place him in the context of Cerf or Licklider. The innovation is different. It is not just about a certain kind of code, or enabling the Internet. [It’s] much more about getting people to see the value in a certain kind of Internet. I don’t think there is anyone else in that class, before or after. Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman’s leadership role has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when looking into the 2102

crystal ball: I think Stallman’s artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as revolutionary works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I think history will be less kind to some of the theories from which RMS operated, and not kind at all to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior. As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals: What history says about the GNU Project, twenty years from now, will depend on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. If we lose, we will be just a footnote. If we win, it is uncertain whether people will know the role of the GNU operating system-if they think the system is “Linux,” they will build a false picture of what happened and why.

But even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now is likely to depend on who dominates politically. Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons the figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other.

John Brown’s slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent trial he effectively roused national demand for abolition. During the Civil War, John Brown was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the 1900s, history textbooks taught that he was crazy. During the era of legal segregation, while bigotry was shameless, the US partly accepted the story that the South wanted to tell about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War and related events.

Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of Stallman’s current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. Although it’s hard to see Stallman’s reputation falling to the level of infamy as Brown’s did during the post-Reconstruction period-Stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence-it’s easy to envision a future in which Stallman’s ideas wind up on the ash-heap. In fashioning the free software cause not as a mass movement but as a collection of private battles against the forces of proprietary temptation, Stallman seems to have created a unwinnable situation, especially for the many acolytes with the same stubborn will.

Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be Stallman’s greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns those who mistake the Stallman personality as counter-productive or epiphenomenal to the “artifacts” of Stalllman’s life. Without that personality, Moglen says, there would be precious few artifiacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a former Supreme Court clerk: Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different.

Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills.

But he was all of a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, that the person I most now compare him to in that sense, all of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through, is Stallman. In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen free software-related issues were swimming through the news.

Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening the GPL.

“We were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about some problems in Eastern Europe and what we were going to do when the problem of the ownership of content began to threaten free software,” Moglen recalls. “As we were talking, I briefly thought about how we must have looked to people passing by. Here we are, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the next steps. And, of course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in on our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the revolution’s right here at this table. This is what’s making it happen.

And this man is the person making it happen.”

Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental simplicity of the Stallman style.

“It was funny,” recalls Moglen. “I said to him, `Richard, you know, you and I are the two guys who didn’t make any money out of this revolution.’ And then I paid for the lunch, because I knew he didn’t have the money to pay for it .’” Endnote

Epilogue:

Crushing Loneliness Writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. The drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage.

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama.

Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers the book’s epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a “tool” and “spy” by the Nation of Islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get Malcolm X’s life story on paper.

While I hesitate to compare this book with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know how this book came to be.

The story behind this story starts in an Oakland apartment, winding its way through the various locales mentioned in the book-Silicon Valley, Maui, Boston, and Cambridge. Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: New York, New York, the book-publishing capital of the world, and Sebastopol, California, the book-publishing capital of Sonoma County.

The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the ill-fated BeOpen web site (http://www.beopen.com/). One of my first assignments was a phone interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/), the popular “news for nerds” site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA Linux Systems and before that, VA Research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories.