When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O’Reilly, gave me a choice between the OPL or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing houses, Tracy’s included, were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not as a form of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have survived?
After I signed the contract, I notified Stallman that the book project was back on. I mentioned the choice O’Reilly was giving me between the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License. I told him I was leaning toward the OPL, if only for the fact I saw no reason to give O’Reilly’s competitors a chance to print the same book under a different cover. Stallman wrote back, arguing in favor of the GFDL, noting that O’Reilly had already used it several times in the past. Despite the events of the past year, I suggested a deal. I would choose the GFDL if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and if Stallman agreed to help O’Reilly publicize the book. Stallman agreed to participate in more interviews but said that his participation in publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. Viewing this as only fair, I set up an interview for December 17, 2001 in Cambridge.
I set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife Tracy was taking to Boston. Two days before leaving, Tracy suggested I invite Stallman out to dinner.
“After all”, she said, “he is the one who brought us together”.
I sent an email to Stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. When I drove up to Boston the next day, I met Tracy at her hotel and hopped the T to head over to MIT. When we got to Tech Square, I found Stallman in the middle of a conversation just as we knocked on the door.
“I hope you don’t mind”, he said, pulling the door open far enough so that Tracy and I could just barely hear Stallman’s conversational counterpart. It was a youngish woman, mid-20s I’d say, named Sarah.
“I took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us”, Stallman said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same cat-like smile he gave me back in that Palo Alto restaurant.
To be honest, I wasn’t too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman’s mother. “In fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the Takeda Award”, Lippman told me at the time.[7]
On the way over to the restaurant, I learned the circumstances of Sarah and Richard’s first meeting. Interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. Working on her own fictional book, Sarah said she heard about Stallman and what an interesting character he was. She promptly decided to create a character in her book on Stallman and, in the interests of researching the character, set up an interview with Stallman. Things quickly went from there. The two had been dating since the beginning of 2001, she said.
“I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern”, Sarah said, explaining her attraction to Stallman.
My wife immediately threw back the question: “What was the issue?”
“Crushing loneliness”.
During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn’t see anything to suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered-a flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman’s eyes seemed to fixate on my wife’s chest-Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness. At one point, my wife uttered an emphatic “God forbid” only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke.
“I hate to break it to you, but there is no God”, Stallman said.
Afterwards, when the dinner was complete and Sarah had departed, Stallman seemed to let his guard down a little. As we walked to a nearby bookstore, he admitted that the last 12 months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. “I thought I was going to be alone forever”, he said. “I’m glad I was wrong”.
Before parting, Stallman handed me his “pleasure card”, a business card listing Stallman’s address, phone number, and favorite pastimes (“sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance”) so that I might set up a final interview.
The next day, over another meal of dim sum, Stallman seemed even more lovestruck than the night before. Recalling his debates with Currier House dorm maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, Stallman expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to immortality. “Now that I’m finally starting to have happiness in my life, I want to have more”, he said.
When I mentioned Sarah’s “crushing loneliness” comment, Stallman failed to see a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness on a hacker level. “The impulse to share code is about friendship but friendship at a much lower level”, he said. Later, however, when the subject came up again, Stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual loneliness, had played a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the GNU Project.
“My fascination with computers was not a consequence of anything else”, he said. “I wouldn’t have been less fascinated with computers if I had been popular and all the women flocked to me. However, it’s certainly true the experience of feeling I didn’t have a home, finding one and losing it, finding another and having it destroyed, affected me deeply. The one I lost was the dorm. The one that was destroyed was the AI Lab. The precariousness of not having any kind of home or community was very powerful. It made me want to fight to get it back”.
After the interview, I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of emotional symmetry. Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable.
While I’m sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman-indeed, after reading this book, some might feel zero affinity-I’m sure most will agree. Few individuals offer as singular a human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait.
