Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software Part 11

from the Lisp Machine project.Ibid.: 196. According to Stallman, MIT administrators backed Stallman up. "I was never threatened," he says. "I did make changes in my practices, though. Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code. I used only the doc.u.mentation and wrote the code from that."

Whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified Stallman's resolve. With no source code to review, Stallman filled in the software gaps according to his own tastes and enlisted members of the AI Lab to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. He also made sure LMI programmers had direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says.

Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman's nonpacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict. According to another Newquist-related story, Stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk into Symbolics' offices."Ibid. Newquist, who says this anecdote was confirmed by several Symbolics executives, writes, "The message caused a brief flurry of excitement and speculation on the part of Symbolics' employees, but ultimately, no one took Stallman's outburst that seriously."

Although Stallman would deny any memory of the email and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor,"

he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head.

"I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the process," Stallman says. "I thought my life was over."

The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the "destruction" of his "home"-i.e., the demise of the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In a later email interview with Levy, Stallman would liken himself to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The a.n.a.logy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost mythical, terms. In reality, however, it glosses over the tension between Stallman and his fellow AI Lab hackers prior to the Symbolics-LMI schism. Instead of seeing Symbolics as an exterminating force, many of Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate marketplace where manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as a troubling anachronism.

Stallman does not dispute this alternate view of historical events. In fact, he says it was yet another reason for the hostility triggered by the Symbolics "ultimatum." Even before Symbolics hired away most of the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him.

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

Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret."

Although Stallman felt anger toward the hackers who orchestrated this petty form of ostracism, the Symbolics controversy dredged up a new kind of anger, the anger of a person about to lose his home. When Symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes, Stallman responded by holing up in his MIT offices and rewriting each new software feature and tool from scratch. Frustrating as it may have been, it guaranteed that future Lisp Machine users had unfettered access to the same features as Symbolics users.

It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers-a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter.

Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period: I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute-Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!"See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 426.

For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of pa.s.sage toward which Stallman had been careening ever since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day, while taking a break from writing code, Stallman experienced a traumatic moment pa.s.sing through the lab's equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the hulking, unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled by the dormant lights, lights that once actively blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact was not unlike coming across a beloved family member's well-preserved corpse.

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

he says. "Seeing the machine there, dead, with n.o.body left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my community had been destroyed."

Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The Lisp Machine, despite all the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a sideshow to the large battles in the technology marketplace. The relentless pace of computer miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful microprocessors that would soon incorporate the machine's hardware and software capabilities like a modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.

Riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds-thousands-of commercial software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for hackers to review or share source code. The licenses were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away would-be interlopers. Software, once a form of garnish most hardware companies gave away to make their expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main dish. In their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal.

Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal computer systems. Companies such as Apple Computer and Commodore were minting fresh millionaires selling machines with built-in operating systems. Unaware of the hacker culture and its distaste for binary-only software, many of these users saw little need to protest when these companies failed to attach the accompanying source-code files. A few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new programs and savvy enough to copyright them as legally protected works.

One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout two years Stallman's junior.

Although Stallman didn't know it at the time, seven years before sending out his message to the n et.unix-wizards newsgroup, Gates, a budding entrepreneur and general partner with the Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later spelled as Microsoft, had sent out his own open letter to the software-developer community. Written in response to the PC users copying Micro-Soft's software programs, Gates' " Open Letter to Hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software development.

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

asked Gates. "What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, doc.u.menting his product, and distributing it for free?"See Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976). To view an online copy of this letter, go to

http://www.blinkenlights.com/cla.s.siccmp/gateswhine.html.

Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive, Gates' 1976 letter nevertheless represented the changing att.i.tude toward software both among commercial software companies and commercial software developers.

Why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said otherwise? As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, selling software became more than a way to recoup costs; it became a political statement. At a time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up during the half century following the Great Depression, more than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompet.i.tive and, by extension, un-American. At best, it was a throwback to the anticorporate att.i.tudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarra.s.sing reminder of an idealistic age.

For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as an embarra.s.sing throwback to the 1950s, Stallman didn't mind living out of step with his peers. As a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best software, however, Stallman faced what he could only describe as a "stark moral choice": either get over his ethical objection for " proprietary" software-the term Stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any program that carried private copyright or end-user license that restricted copying and modification-or dedicate his life to building an alternate, nonproprietary system of software programs. Given his recent months-long ordeal with Symbolics, Stallman felt more comfortable with the latter option. "I suppose I could have stopped working on computers altogether,"

Stallman says. "I had no special skills, but I'm sure I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant, probably, but I could've been a waiter somewhere."

Being a waiter-i.e., dropping out of programming altogether-would have meant completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had given him so much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to Cambridge, Stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when software programming provided the only pleasure. Rather than drop out, Stallman decided to stick it out.

An atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, dharma, or a divine calling in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural one. After all, it was Stallman's own personal combination of stubbornness, foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to consider a fork in the road most others didn't know existed. In describing the decision in a chapter for the 1999 book, Open Sources, Stallman cites the spirit encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage Hillel: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?If I am only for myself, what am I?If not now, when?See Richard Stallman, Open Sources (O'Reilly & a.s.sociates, Inc., 1999): 56. Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said."

Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and expresses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem."

Once he reached that decision, Stallman says, everything else "fell into place." He would abstain from using software programs that forced him to compromise his ethical beliefs, while at the same time devoting his life to the creation of software that would make it easier for others to follow the same path. Pledging to build a free software operating system "or die trying-of old age, of course," Stallman quips, he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU.

The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of MIT. Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to retain rent-free access to his MIT office. He also had the ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or Inst.i.tute ownership of the software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment.

For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade in its early stages.

"The community reaction was pretty much uniform,"

recalls Rich Morin, leader of a Unix user group at the time. "People said, 'Oh, that's a great idea. Show us your code. Show us it can be done.'"

In true hacker fashion, Stallman began looking for existing programs and tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of the first was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written in the popular C programming language into machine-readable code. Translated from the Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free University Compiler Kit. Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. When the author informed him that the words "Free University" were a reference to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Stallman was chagrined.

"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not," recalls Stallman.

"I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform compiler."

Eventually Stallman found a Pastel language compiler written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to Stallman's knowledge at the time, the compiler was free to copy and modify. Unfortunately, the program possessed a sizable design flaw: it saved each program into core memory, tying up precious s.p.a.ce for other software activities. On mainframe systems this design flaw had been forgivable. On Unix systems it was a crippling barrier, since the machines that ran Unix were too small to handle the large files generated. Stallman made substantial progress at first, building a C-compatible frontend to the compiler. By summer, however, he had come to the conclusion that he would have to build a totally new compiler from scratch.

In September of 1984, Stallman shelved compiler development for the near term and began searching for lower-lying fruit. He began development of a GNU version of Emacs, the program he himself had been supervising for a decade. The decision was strategic.

Within the Unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist (and Unix cocreator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but neither offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs. In rewriting Emacs for the Unix audience, Stallman stood a better chance of showing off his skills. It also stood to reason that Emacs users might be more attuned to the Stallman mentality.

Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "I wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop one."

Once again, the notion of reinventing the wheel grated on Stallman's efficient hacker sensibilities. In writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon following the footsteps of Carnegie Mellon graduate student James Gosling, author of a C-based version dubbed Gosling Emacs or GOSMACS. Gosling's version of Emacs included an interpreter that exploited a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language called MOCKLISP. Determined to build GNU Emacs on a similar Lisp foundation, Stallman borrowed copiously from Gosling's innovations. Although Gosling had put GOSMACS under copyright and had sold the rights to UniPress, a privately held software company, Stallman cited the a.s.surances of a fellow developer who had partic.i.p.ated in the early MOCKLISP interpreter. According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, had a.s.sured early collaborators that their work would remain accessible. When UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, however, the company threatened to enforce the copyright. Once again, Stallman faced the prospect of building from the ground up.

In the course of reverse-engineering Gosling's interpreter, Stallman would create a fully functional Lisp interpreter, rendering the need for Gosling's original interpreter moot. Nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights-indeed, the very notion of developers having software rights to sell in the first place-rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Inst.i.tute, Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the dangers a.s.sociated with proprietary software.

"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it."

Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's innovations would a.s.sist both Stallman and the free software movement in the long term. It would force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued " The GNU Manifesto," an expansion of the original announcement posted in September, 1983. Stallman included within the doc.u.ment a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:

"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto" (1985).

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

With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project, Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal.

With Stallman as president and various hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the GNU Project.

Robert Cha.s.sell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc., became one of five charter board members at the Free Software Foundation following a dinner conversation with Stallman. Cha.s.sell also served as the organization's treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew.

"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were something in the order of $23,000, give or take,"

Cha.s.sell recalls. "Richard had his office, and we borrowed s.p.a.ce. I put all the stuff, especially the tapes, under my desk. It wasn't until sometime later LMI loaned us some s.p.a.ce where we could store tapes and things of that sort."

In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided a center of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market that had seemed so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU announcement was becoming increasingly compet.i.tive. In an attempt to tighten their hold on customers, companies were starting to close off access to Unix source code, a trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software projects.

The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning to see him as a software Ca.s.sandra.

"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 Cha.s.sell, 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.'"

For Cha.s.sell, the decision to partic.i.p.ate in the Free Software Foundation came down to his own personal feelings of loss. Prior to LMI, Cha.s.sell had been working for hire, writing an introductory book on Unix for Cadmus, Inc., a Cambridge-area software company.

When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down with it, Cha.s.sell says he attempted to buy the rights back with no success.

"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on shelf somewhere, unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the system," Cha.s.sell says. "It was quite a good introduction if I may say so myself. It would have taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book]

into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in my memory, was lost."