Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, O’Reilly, $22.95, ISBN 0596002874
IN 1990, Richard Stallman won a $240,000 MacArthur award for being very bright indeed. One of his brightest ideas is free software: not free as in zero-cost, but free as in open for modification.
Stallman’s belief that it is morally wrong to fence off software and stop it being adapted by its users sets him squarely against today’s tightening patent and copyright regimes. To counter what he sees as the business world’s evil demands he set up the GNU project in 1984 to create a full suite of free software. Later it became the inspiration for the operating system Linux, which includes a lot of GNU software. Stallman calls it GNU/Linux.
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What makes someone so stubborn, alienated and intense tick? Sam Williams takes us through Stallman’s parents’ divorce and the loss of his software community at MIT. He describes everything from Stallman’s habit of chewing his long hair in public to his squabbles with others in the open-source movement who actually share most of his goals.
Stallman’s enduring contribution is the General Public License, which gave hackers and lawyers alike a blueprint for using copyright to enforce liberties rather than restrictions. But the most memorable moment from Free as in Freedom comes when Williams asks Stallman what he would have done otherwise. “I could have been a waiter.” Pure Spinal Tap.
