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 classmates were listening to Motown and acid rock, Stallman preferred classical 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 classmates rushed out to purchase the latest Beatles albums 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 assembly 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 Japanese 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. Classic 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.[10] 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 assumes 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 publishing? 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 documents. 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 documents 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 title 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
