If the last two decades have brought dramatic changes to the software marketplace, they have brought even more dramatic changes to Stallman himself. Gone is the skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his entire days communing with his beloved PDP-10. In his place stands a heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and rabbinical beard, a man who now spends the bulk of his time writing and answering email, haranguing fellow programmers, and giving speeches like the one today. Dressed in an aqua-colored T-shirt and brown polyester pants, Stallman looks like a desert hermit who just stepped out of a Salvation Army dressing room.
The crowd is filled with visitors who share Stallman’s fashion and grooming tastes. Many come bearing laptop computers and cellular modems, all the better to record and transmit Stallman’s words to a waiting Internet audience. The gender ratio is roughly 15 males to 1 female, and 1 of the 7 or 8 females in the room comes in bearing a stuffed penguin, the official Linux mascot, while another carries a stuffed teddy bear.
Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a seat in a front-row chair, tapping a few commands into an already-opened laptop. For the next 10 minutes Stallman is oblivious to the growing number of students, professors, and fans circulating in front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage.
Before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of academic formality must be observed. Stallman’s appearance merits not one but two introductions. Mike Uretsky, codirector of the Stern School’s Center for Advanced Technology, provides the first.
“The role of a university is to foster debate and to have interesting discussions”, Uretsky says. “This particular presentation, this seminar falls right into that mold. I find the discussion of open source particularly interesting”.
Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist.
“I do free software”, Stallman says to rising laughter. “Open source is a different movement”.
The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked with Stallman partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for Jack Benny’s trademark, “Now cut that out!” phrase during each radio program.
Uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the stage to Edmond Schonberg, a professor in the NYU computer-science department. As a computer programmer and GNU Project contributor, Schonberg knows which linguistic land mines to avoid. He deftly summarizes Stallman’s career from the perspective of a modern-day programmer.
“Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally [about] problems concerning the unavailability of source code”, says Schonberg. “He has developed a coherent philosophy that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and of what the software community actually represents”.
Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his chair, and takes the stage.
At first, Stallman’s address seems more Catskills comedy routine than political speech. “I’d like to thank Microsoft for providing me the opportunity to be on this platform”, Stallman wisecracks. “For the past few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banned somewhere”.
For the uninitiated, Stallman dives into a quick free software warm-up analogy. He likens a software program to a cooking recipe. Both provide useful step-by-step instructions on how to complete a desired task and can be easily modified if a user has special desires or circumstances. “You don’t have to follow a recipe exactly”, Stallman notes. “You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, ’cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt-whatever”.
Most importantly, Stallman says, software programs and recipes are both easy to share. In giving a recipe to a dinner guest, a cook loses little more than time and the cost of the paper the recipe was written on. Software programs require even less, usually a few mouse-clicks and a modicum of electricity. In both instances, however, the person giving the information gains two things: increased friendship and the ability to borrow interesting recipes in return.
“Imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black boxes”, Stallman says, shifting gears. “You couldn’t see what ingredients they’re using, let alone change them, and imagine if you made a copy for a friend. They would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. That world would create tremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes. But that is exactly what the world of proprietary software is like. A world in which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented”.
With this introductory analogy out of the way, Stallman launches into a retelling of the Xerox laser-printer episode. Like the recipe analogy, the laser-printer story is a useful rhetorical device. With its parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly things can change in the software world. Drawing listeners back to an era before Amazon.com one-click shopping, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle databases, it asks the listener to examine the notion of software ownership free of its current corporate logos.
Stallman delivers the story with all the polish and practice of a local district attorney conducting a closing argument. When he gets to the part about the Carnegie Mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy of the printer source code, Stallman pauses.
“He had betrayed us”, Stallman says. “But he didn’t just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you”.
On the word “you”, Stallman points his index finger accusingly at an unsuspecting member of the audience. The targeted audience member’s eyebrows flinch slightly, but Stallman’s own eyes have moved on. Slowly and deliberately, Stallman picks out a second listener to nervous titters from the crowd. “And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you, too”, he says, pointing at an audience member three rows behind the first.
By the time Stallman has a third audience member picked out, the titters have given away to general laughter. The gesture seems a bit staged, because it is. Still, when it comes time to wrap up the Xerox laser-printer story, Stallman does so with a showman’s flourish. “He probably did it to most of the people here in this room- except a few, maybe, who weren’t born yet in 1980”, Stallman says, drawing more laughs. “[That’s] because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the planet Earth”.
