Power To The Programmer

Nathan Cobb, Globe Staff
The Boston Globe

October 21, 1990

Long ago and far away, in a computer galaxy that stretched from the Valley of Silicon to the Highway of Technology, there existed a small but perfect land. Located within a mysterious continent known as the Most Impenetrable Terrain (MIT), this nation was home to a hairy, unkempt but brilliant species called Hackers. History would later confuse these Hackers with their evil offshoot, known as Crackers, whose uninvited entries into computer systems caused great outrage. But Hackers wanted only to spend long days and nights in pursuit of technological pleasure. Sustained by Coca-Cola and Chinese food, they hunched over their computer consoles while their fingers blazed a firestorm of power programming for its own sake.

There were several wizards among the Hackers. These particularly hollow-eyed men with particularly pasty skin had programming skills that earned them mythical status both within and beyond the Most Impenetrable Terrain. But, in time, most of the Hackers, wizards and otherwise, departed the happy land, lured by the Real World and the promise of riches. Only one wizard remained behind, preaching the message of pure Hacking. He continued to espouse the Hacker philosophy of computer sharing and openness, eschewing such evil notions as security and copyrights. He was called RMS, and he referred to himself as the Last of the True Hackers. To this day, the title remains on his resume. You can look it up.

Richard Matthew Stallman -- RMS to his computer, as well as to many human beings -- is gently rocking from one foot to the other as he dictates his responses to the 75 or so communiques that have piled up in his electronic mailbox during the past few hours:

"One R. We are working on system software mostly first comma but we want applications, too. Period. Space. Space. We are working on a spreadsheet now. Trol N. There are many applications programs in the task list. Carriage, carriage. Trol X-O. Space. Space. Space. Meta V. Trol X-O . . ."

On and on the high-pitched voice continues, because Stallman, despite being a world-class programmer, does not do his own typing. For the past year and a half he has suffered severe pain in his fingers when he works a computer keyboard, a condition that has not been satisfactorily diagnosed despite examination by several doctors. More than one acquaintance suggests that the pain might be psychosomatic, a notion that Stallman dismisses. In any case, the most obvious result of the condition is that he must cram a typist into his tiny office within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which occupies much of a dull, rectangular building in Cambridge's Technology Square.

Although he no longer has an official connection to the interdepartmental computer research facility, whose major funding source is the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Stallman lives, literally, within the AI lab, in a 9-by-12-foot space. He survives comfortably amid a rat's nest of clothes, books, records, electronic hardware, decaffeinated teas, packages of cookies, empty soda cans, and other worldly possessions. To enter this sanctum when Stallman is in programming mode is often to be ignored, although at other times he is likely to react with a burst of proselytization for one of his other interests. "Have you ever listened to gamelan music?" he might ask, proffering a recording of bells and gongs from Bali. "You haven't? Oh, you've got to hear gamelan music."

It was three months ago that Kenneth Hope, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, telephoned this 37-year-old, world-class programmer to inform him that he would receive $240,000 over five years as the winner of one of those unsolicited "genius" grants that the foundation periodically bestows upon batches of creative and often obscure people. "Oh, sure," Stallman mused to himself upon hearing the news. "So long as I drive to New Hampshire and look at some condos."

After he realized that the prize didn't involve inspecting real estate, Stallman received a number of calls and visits from reporters who tended to portray him as both poor and reclusive. Wrong on both counts. True, he chooses to perform paid consulting work only a few weeks a year. But when your asking price is usually $250 an hour, you can earn more than $30,000 by working for about a month -- as Stallman says he did last year, thereby putting himself roughly $25,000 above the official annual poverty level. (Meanwhile, your bank account tends to flourish when you part with money as reluctantly as Stallman does.) And although the artificial intelligence lab's unofficial wizard lives something more secluded than a let's-hit-the-dance-clubs lifestyle, it's obvious that he enjoys the notoriety that the MacArthur grant has brought him. "He just loves being the center of attention," says one close friend.

Even within MIT, which is to eccentricity what the Vatican is to Catholicism, Stallman is considered a tad unusual. It is not merely a matter of having hair that flows to his shoulder blades, a less-than-imposing 140-pound physique, nocturnal work habits brought about in part by insomnia, a geeky wardrobe, a disinclination to make small talk, confirmed atheism, and a girlfriend who freely admits she is both bisexual and married. It's more the fact that Stallman is still there, despite severing his official umbilical cord with the AI lab in 1984. It was two years later that he literally moved into the building, shortly after a fire destroyed the Cambridge house in which he had been living --something he learned about only when a friend informed him via an electronic message as he was hunkered down with his computer.

"Stallman is a national asset, and it's to our benefit to have him around, in terms of reputation-building," explains Patrick Winston, the lab's director. "It's also good for our students to see someone who believes passionately in what he's doing and who is constructing his life around that passion." Still, he concedes, there are people at MIT who don't consider Stallman the best of role models. So it surely didn't hurt when, in 1988, Apple Computer Inc. cofounder Steven Jobs, having heard reports -- untrue, according to Winston -- that the programmer was about to be evicted from his quarters for space reasons, offered a ringing endorsement of Stallman to Paul Gray, then the president of MIT.

So RMS endures, at least partly as a nagging conscience. Says Gerald Sussman, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and a staunch Stallman supporter: "He does great work, and it's great to have an honest man around who tells you that you're full of crap."

Which he'll do at the drop of a disk. The people who call Stallman unfailingly honest and fundamentally kind also frequently say that he is self-centered and uncompromising. "He's intensely goal-directed, and he won't waste a fraction of a minute that's not connected to his own particular goal," says Devon McCullough, a computer hacker who was once Stallman's roommate. "If you're not serving whatever purpose he has in mind, he really has no time for you."

Max Vasilatos, an engineer and close friend who often accompanies Stallman when he makes his evening dining forays, frequently to Boston's Chinatown, says it simply wouldn't occur to Stallman that she might not want to go to the place he'd already chosen.

But social backwardness and occasional emotional outbursts are commonplace in an environment where brilliance is the coin of the realm. Besides, Stallman wants the AI lab as much as it wants him. "He'd be up the creek without it," says Simson Garfinkel, a graduate student in the lab who is writing a book about Stallman. "There's no other place that would let him do the kind of work he does and not want to own the results."

Okay, so what is he actually doing up there on the fourth floor of that ugly modern building? What he is doing is writing and promoting "free" software. He is president of a nonprofit, tax-exempt, five-year-old corporation called the Free Software Foundation Inc., whose 15 paid staffers are helping him create software -- the instructions that tell a computer what to do -- which users are legally permitted to copy and to pass on.

By providing the source code for each of its programs, i.e., the instructions that a computer processes into code it can understand, FSF also encourages users to learn how these programs were written, to make changes and improvements in them, and to share those alterations. It also prevents profiteers from denying these rights to others. The group refers to the legal instrument that ensures these freedoms as a copyleft. The hacker philosophy lives.

But free software is not necessarily free of charge; FSF took in $288,000 in fiscal 1989 from people who chose to acquire its tapes and manuals directly from the corporation itself. On the other hand, free software isn't exactly rampant capitalism, either.

"It's time to march! Pick up your signs!"

A couple of weeks after the surprise call from the MacArthur Fellows Program, Stallman led a 320-member protest march through Technology Square to the headquarters of Lotus Development Corporation. The rally had been organized by the 170-member League for Programming Freedom (Richard M. Stallman, president) to protest the "look-and-feel" copyright lawsuits that certain computer software companies, including Lotus, have filed against competitors who, they contend, have duplicated their programs' interactions with users. As a slogan, "Ease of use, not legal abuse" wasn't exactly in a class with "We shall overcome" or "Hell, no, we won't go." A party atmosphere prevailed during the march, and most observers barely looked up from their frozen yogurt as the troops passed. When Stallman himself wasn't unsuccessfully exhorting watchers to join the crowd, he was answering questions posed by a gaggle of journalists who walked beside him.

At the nine-story Lotus building on the northern bank of the Charles River, only a few employees stood on a balcony overlooking the protesters. (Perhaps this was because, as one employee explained, an internal electronic memo had pointed out that observing the opposition could be construed as showing support for it.) Inside, Lotus vice president and general counsel Thomas Lemberg dismissed the protesters as a mere annoyance. After all, Lotus had recently won a closely watched case in US District Court in Boston wherein it had charged that Paperback Software International, of Berkeley, California, had infringed the copyright of the widely used Lotus 1-2-3 personal-computer spreadsheet. Four days after the ruling, Lotus filed similar suits against two other competitors. And why should this highly successful software firm, which did $556 million in sales in 1989, care if a few pickets were cluttering up the sidewalk?

And why should anyone fret about look-and-feel copyright lawsuits anyway? To Stallman the question is as dumb as the answer is obvious: They will, he strongly believes, result in legally imposed monopolies. "They will stop programming to a large extent, because programming will be very risky," he contends. "The danger of a lawsuit will be present in every decision a programmer makes." He feels that such lawsuits are every bit as serious as, say, the cutting of the oil pipeline from the Middle East. "The only thing we could do," he warns solemnly, "is write off the United States."

Yes, he exaggerates. But this is no radical, off-the-wall cause. Challenging the existence and protection of look-and-feel copyrights (and software patents, too) is not the same as developing all that free software. The latter is an issue on which Stallman probably couldn't get 32 people to march with him, let alone 320. Software that anyone could legally duplicate verbatim without paying? Forget it. The conservative entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley and Technology Highway would rather read the business pages of Pravda. But the look-and-feel copyright question is something else, a legal and ethical squabble that has divided the software industry itself. It's a debate over whether a particular program's user interface -- how it looks on a computer screen, its commands, and the other ways in which a user communicates with it -- can legally be compatible with a competitor's program.

Let's compare analogies.

Stallman's favorite is that copyrighting the look and feel of a piece of software is like claiming ownership of the concept of directing an automobile with a steering wheel. If someone owns the rights to it, all other car manufacturers will have to develop different types of steering systems. And drivers are going to have to learn on all of them.

Lotus's Lemberg trots out his analogy: Gone with the Wind. "It's a copyright violation to duplicate that book," he points out. "But it's also a copyright violation to copy the plot, or a particular scene, or even Rhett Butler and the rest of that crowd. A computer program is a complex work, and it includes the interface."

None of this mattered until the 1980s, when a software industry that had been born of shared creativity matured into an adult that worried about property protection. Software patents became legal in the United States in 1981, while look-and-feel copyright litigation emerged about five years later. But the issue is far from settled. As new court cases continue to surface, the waters are being muddied. For example, 1-2-3 is generally considered to be an evolutionary product that was built upon the foundation of another, earlier spreadsheet known as VisiCalc. Meanwhile, at least one company has filed suit against Lotus, charging that 1-2-3 infringes on an existing patent. To Stallman, that's precisely the point. Writing software is a matter of taking what has gone before and tinkering with it, changing it, shaping it, improving it. That's how he's been concocting computer programs since he wandered into the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as a Harvard freshman in 1971 and found a collection of hard-core hackers happily sharing their wild-eyed genius in the middle of the night. Now, he contends, everyone is too scared to move. And the Last of the True Hackers may soon be among them.

Richard Stallman was 11 years old when he encountered his first computer manual. "I wanted to write programs so much that I wrote them down on paper, even though I couldn't possibly run them," he recalls. Like many early computer hackers, he'd grown up tinkering with such construction toys as Erector sets and Lego bricks. But this! "With computers, I could actually do things that worked," he says. "I could actually use them to do something."

The childhood he describes was mostly joyless. An only child whose parents parted when he was 3, he lived with his mother on New York's Upper West Side. Their relationship was difficult. "Later, my mother told me that when she desperately needed a man to rely on, she turned to me," Stallman recalls. "When I was unable to fulfill that role, she got mad at me. But I didn't know that. All I knew was that she was mad at me." Alice Lippman, Stallman's mother, declines to discuss her son's personal life. "Richard was rebellious," is all she will say.

Accepting authority, then as now, was clearly not his strong suit. "I simply would not recognize it," he says. He was disruptive in class, and eventually spent five years in a school for children with emotional and mental problems. What he wanted most was to travel to other planets, but he settled for computers. When he was 16 he began spending time at the IBM New York Scientific Center, writing numerical-analysis programs in FORTRAN, a widely used programming language. "I asked him, 'Richard, what do you know about computers?' " his mother remembers. "He said, 'Oh, Mom, I read a book.' "

Stallman rhapsodizes about Harvard, which he entered in 1970. He calls it his first real home. No one gave him orders, he met young women who didn't think he was odd, he made friends. He refers to graduating in 1974, magna cum laude with a BA in physics, as "getting kicked out for passing too many classes." But if Harvard was home, what was MIT's AI lab? For it was there that Stallman was already spending much of his time, riding with the high-tech hot rodders who had foregone immersion in the counterculture in favor of hacking their brains out up on the ninth floor of Technology Square, goosing the engines of a DEC-20 computer.

The AI lab was then a haven for those strange, brilliant kids who didn't have a social clue but were pushing the edge of the computer envelope for all it was worth. Hacking -- which really meant the ability to innovate with style and virtuosity -- was perfect for Stallman because it was based on sharing and a distrust of authority. If certain professors locked their terminals in their offices at night, and terminals were in short supply, the hackers would simply pick the locks. Stallman was a poor lock-picker, but his 5-foot-10-inch frame was wiry enough to allow him to crawl over ceilings and under false floors.

MIT, after all, was the very place where the word "hacking" had been coined. Hackers were hired by the AI lab, as Stallman was after his freshman year at Harvard in 1971, to maintain and improve one of the world's most powerful computer systems. To invent, really. "There were people there who could build a whole system in a few days that someone else might take a year to build," says Marvin Minsky, who cofounded the lab in the 1960s and later hired Stallman. "I've only met about 10 people in my life who could do that. Richard is one of them."

Stallman's eight years as an AI-lab full-timer began in 1975. That was the year he completed Emacs, a widely used, flexible editing program that encouraged its users to alter and/or improve it. Meanwhile, however, many of the earlier hackers were leaving the lab to work in business. Their replacements, to Stallman at least, seemed more interested in owning programs than in sharing them. Civilization was settling in. The lab's computer rooms now stood empty at night, Stallman lamented. Machines broke and weren't repaired.

Finally, during the early 1980s, two competing companies with roots deep in the AI lab began producing pioneering computers known as LISP machines. At first both firms shared their software improvements with each other, as well as with MIT, where the machines had been designed. But then one of the companies, Symbolics Inc., decided that it would no longer share with the other firm, LISP Machines Inc. To Stallman, this was heresy. Sharing, after all, had been the very heartbeat of the hacker code. So, back at MIT, which received the Symbolics improvements of LISP as part of its licensing agreement, Stallman set about seeing how they worked. He then wrote similar programming code that would more or less duplicate the improvements, and passed it along to LISP Machines. It was a herculean effort. "Symbolics accused me of costing them millions of dollars," Stallman says today. "I hoped that it was true."

It was his last official hack. Afraid that MIT might license the software he developed -- the university now owns as many as 50 registered computer software copyrights, the vast majority of which it licenses -- he handed in his resignation in January 1984. But not his key.

After cutting the cord, Stallman and his Free Software Foundation began feverishly working on his principal opus, Project GNU. Now partially completed, with several of its programs already in use, GNU is a freely distributed software system that is a version of UNIX, a system developed by AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. and widely used in scientific and academic computing. A handful of hardware manufacturers -- including Steven Jobs' current computer venture, NeXT Inc. -- package it with their equipment.

Yet there may be no GNU if look-and-feel copyright lawsuits march on. So Stallman, the sign-toting protester of such litigation, is hardly a disinterested observer. After all, much of GNU looks and feels like other programs. For instance, a GNU spreadsheet, now in development, is intended to allow users to set up commands that are compatible with several types of spreadsheets, including the world's most popular: Lotus 1-2-3. "I'm interested in programming freedom because my freedom to write the free software is being taken away," Stallman admits. "I moved to a political campaign to preserve my freedom to keep on writing free software." Says Robert Chassell, FSF's treasurer: "Most people have a private life and a professional life. Richard has one life, and that's Project GNU."

Part of the hacker mindset, of course, is a much stronger commitment to technology than to human beings. Stallman's relationships with people have always been uncomfortable. Social nuances tend to escape him. For example, he frequently blurts out his private thoughts to people he's just met. (Instead of a business card, he hands out a "pleasure card," which introduces him as "sharing good books, good food, and exotic music and dance, TENDER EMBRACES, unusual sense of humor.") He contends that he's become more socially polished in the past few years, and several acquantances agree. But he also concedes, "I always thought I was a failure at dealing with people and a success with technical things. I gather that most people think of themselves as totally successful or totally failures. I always had two different sides of me, one that I saw as successful and one that I saw as incompetent."

In her 1984 book, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, MIT associate professor Sherry Turkle writes, "Most hackers are young men for whom at a very early age mastery became highly charged, emotional, colored by a particular desire for perfection, and focused on triumph over things." As a teen-ager, Stallman recalls, he saw computers as "a way to get happiness." Isn't it possible that, angered by authority, he became the authority, creating computer universes in which he alone was the lawgiver? After all, his fingers spoke and the computer obeyed. Stallman himself pooh-poohs this notion, arguing that the issue of control is bogus because the computer can't fight back. But if that's true, why does Devon McCullough remember a dark night back in the early 1980s, when he heard a blood-curdling scream from somewhere deep in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory? Why does he remember discovering Stallman sitting in front of a computer console in tears, screaming at the machine, which had obviously gotten the upper hand, "How can you do this? How can you do this? How can you do this?"

RMS says he is not obsessed with computers. "I'm obsessed with not giving up," he contends. That means remaining true to the hacker code of freedom and sharing, even while proclaiming that he is the last survivor of a dead culture. On the other hand, this is a programmer who refuses to say goodbye. Instead, at the end of every conversation, he chirps, "Happy hacking."

Caption: PHOTO

1. PHOTOGRAPH BY YUNGHI KIM/THE BOSTON GLOBE / Stallman's complaint: "My freedom to write free software is being taken away."

2. Yunghi Kim/The Boston Globe / Stallman at a software-copyright protest this summer in Cambridge.

Copyright 1990