Waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when you’re a software programmer,
the difference between waiting for a machine and waiting on a machine is a sizable one.
“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.’”
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?
To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, slogans like “make love not war” had a taunting quality. Stallman did not want to make war, at least not in Southeast Asia, but nobody was inviting him to make love either.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves “functional” works – e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as “testimonial” – e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. It also includes works of personal expression – e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person’s recollections or point of view, which Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable. The third category includes works of art and entertainment.
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.
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.”
“I started crying right there in the machine room,” he says. “Seeing the machine there, dead, with nobody left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my community had been destroyed.”
“A lot of people don’t realize, until they’ve had it happen to them, how frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software program only to have it taken away,” says Chassell, summarizing the feelings and opinions of the correspondents writing in to the FSF during the early years. “After that happens a couple of times, you start to say to yourself, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’”
“Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society should have for using software, the people considering it are from software companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective,” says Stallman, opening his speech. “What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers.”
“I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal,” he says. “I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we’re in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn’t a government, I couldn’t actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this.”
Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the “routinization” or “institutionalization” of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time.
‘Linux users’ didn’t care about the GNU Project,” Stallman says. “They said, ‘Why should I bother doing these things? I don’t care about the GNU Project. It [the program]’s working for me. It’s working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to us.’ And that was quite surprising, given that people were essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU.” Fooled by their own practice of calling the combination “Linux,” they did not realize that their system was more GNU than Linux.
the dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world of proprietary software. They had begun contributing to free software without perceiving any injustice in nonfree software. For most of them, nothing was at stake beyond convenience. Unless a program was technically inferior, they saw little reason to reject it on licensing issues alone.
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar,”
The word “efficiently” hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things irritate the hacker mind more than inefficiency.
“Imperfect systems infuriate hackers,” observes Steven Levy, another warning I should have listened to before climbing into the car with Stallman. “This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars – the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamn unnecessary [Levy’s emphasis] that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . redesign the entire system.”
“I’m not good at playing games,” Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a shrewd strategist. “I’m not good at looking ahead and anticipating what somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation [of ideas], to say ‘Let’s make the foundation as strong as we can make it.’
Stallman refuses, saying that asking what people will think in 100 years presumes we have no influence over it. The question he prefers is, “What should we do to make a better future?” But most people, when presented with the predictive 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.
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.”
Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now most compare him to in that sense – of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through – is Stallman.
“I don’t care. What they’re doing is evil. I can’t support evil. Good-bye.”