Richard Stallman Is Consumed by the Fight To End Copyrighting of Software

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Free for All: Richard Stallman Is Consumed by the Fight To End Copyrighting of Software

By G. Pascal Zachary
The Wall Street Journal

May 20, 1991

RICHARD STALLMAN wants to free your computer programs from bondage.

He is, he concedes, obsessed. At 38 years old, Mr. Stallman is considered one of the most gifted programmers of his generation. But he is so intent on liberating software that he has little time to devote to his craft.

"Fighting for the freedom to write software has taken all my time away from writing software," he says.

Mr. Stallman's mission is simple yet revolutionary: He wants to abolish the patenting and copyrighting of computer programs. He believes that these "intellectual-property rights" stifle creativity, making it increasingly difficult to program computers in useful ways. Any computer programmer, he says, should be free to use any other program to create a new one -- and not be afraid of being sued.

"It's almost like a programmer has to have a lawyer looking over his shoulder every time he sits down at his computer," he says.

That's a joke. Sort of. In the past decade, intellectual-property law has been expanded to cover software, and companies and programmers have wasted no time in taking advantage of the change. The result is the multibillion-dollar software industry -- and a legal thicket of competing property claims.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Stallman's view is tantamount to heresy in some quarters. His attack is, in short, an attack on capitalism, says Thomas Lemberg, corporate counsel at Lotus Development Corp., which has gone to court to prevent rivals from writing spreadsheet programs that mimic the command sequence of the company's flagship 1-2-3 product.

Ken Wasch, director of Software Publishers Association, a trade group, puts it more demurely: "Free software is out of the mainstream," he says.

Mr. Stallman wouldn't contest that he is unconventional. A self-described hacker, he has an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard University, but no formal training in computers or electronics. "I enjoy playing with computers," he says.

Mr. Stallman is being modest. He actually lives in his office in Cambridge, Mass., and often hacks late into the night. He is exceedingly frugal, and proud of it, boasting that he lived on $8,000 in 1989. Mr. Stallman is so caught up in his work that he often dispenses with social niceties, wearing scruffy clothes and keeping his hair unkempt. He never cooks but invariably eats in restaurants. His beverage of choice: a glass of warm water. "As warm as you can make it," he tells waiters.

Yet for his fans, such eccentricities pale beside his technological talents. "He's the best programmer that ever lived," says Michael Allen, a physicist at the Superconductor Super Collider Laboratory in Dallas. "I'm serious."

Indeed, one of Mr. Stallman's programs, a "compiler" that speeds the tedious task of enabling software written for one type of computer to work on a different computer, is a sensation among professional programmers. A slew of prominent companies, including Intel Corp. and Next Computer Inc., have adopted Mr. Stallman's compiler.

"There's a lot of momentum behind" Mr. Stallman's software, says Steven McGeady, who manages software for Intel's 960 microprocessor. "It will be around for a long time."

Not only nerds recognize Mr. Stallman's talent. Last year, for instance, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave him a coveted "genius" award, which carries a five-year grant worth nearly $300,000. The award, he concedes, "caused some people to respect me more, which is very useful."

Part of Mr. Stallman's reputation stems from the way he works. In an era when a dozen programmers may be assigned to create a single application, and hundreds may tackle an operating system, Mr. Stallman is capable of creating complex programs from scratch. His solo programming style seems macho to colleagues.

He also gets a lot of credit for being true to his ideals. He charges a nominal amount for his software, enough to cover expenses. But more important, he allows companies and programmers to make any changes they want -- provided they agree only to allow others to freely use these changes as well. "Software should be free," he says, "and I'm going to make it free even if I have to write it all myself."

In some ways, Mr. Stallman is a throwback to a simpler era. Twenty years ago, researchers typically swapped programs, embellishing one another's work without much attention to taking credit or nailing down commercial rights. This communal ethic has its roots in an even earlier period, when computers sometimes didn't come with software, or the manufacturer of a computer gave away the software to stimulate demand for its machines.

By the early 1980s, the attitude toward software had changed. The advent of the personal computer and more powerful technical machines called work stations meant millions of people were using computers -- all potential buyers of prepackaged software. Inspired programmers such as William Gates III, founder of Microsoft Corp., seized the opportunity to build a business empire. Even universities got into the act, reaping healthy fees from licensing software created by their researchers.

This repulsed Mr. Stallman, who believes people should pursue their ideals, and not a paycheck. He admits that some programs wouldn't get written without financial incentives but thinks there are enough people willing to program for the social good to satisfy most computing needs. Besides, he says, a lot of programs now don't get written -- or are less useful than they might be -- because programmers are so worried about copyright infringement.

Critics say Mr. Stallman is dreaming. "I understand Stallman's nostalgia for the good old days when this wasn't an industry, when people were just sitting around sharing things," says Mr. Lemberg of Lotus. "But this has become a multibillion-dollar industry."

Still, Mr. Stallman is determined to change things. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Stallman launched his first salvo, embarking on a project to create an operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix, a program that controls the basic features of a computer and is popular with academic researchers. He also envisioned offering various tools for applications development.

All of these programs cost -- or will cost -- simply enough to cover expenses. To protect against someone else profiting from the program, Mr. Stallman has crafted a legal concept he calls "copyleft," which requires that anyone who makes use of his software agree not to assert ownership over any embellishments to it, no matter how original those embellishments are.

Software companies, says Mr. Stallman, should make their money not from selling programs but from servicing them and adding improvements. For example, they would charge for adapting software to meet an individual customer's needs. But the company would have no further claims on the use of that adaptation.

"This won't put any software company out of business, but will change the way they do business," says Michael Tieman, president of Cygnus Support, a Palo Alto, Calif., concern that makes its money as Mr. Stallman envisions -- by servicing GNU software.

While "copyleft" restrictions mainly apply to the small universe of GNU software, a growing number of software experts agree with Mr. Stallman that the current system of protecting software needs an overhaul. These critics say that too often copyrights or patents are granted to programs that are obvious.

"This is an escalating problem," says Adele Goldberg, a former high-ranking researcher at Xerox Corp. who now runs her own software firm, called ParcPlace Systems Inc. Ms. Goldberg says that programmers must spend more of their time on crafting ways around existing patents and that simply to defend her own interests she must file for copyrights and patents as bargaining chips. Nevertheless, her closely held concern recently issued a statement in support of Mr. Stallman, calling for efforts to eliminate the patenting of software, as well as to stop the expansion of copyright protections for programs.

In the meantime, Mr. Stallman's GNU project is increasingly hemmed in by copyright and patent claims only now surfacing.

The project suffered a major blow early this year when American Telephone & Telegraph Co. insisted that programmers stop infringing on a 1985 Bell Laboratories patent that covers the basic code for running several programs at the same time. Because Mr. Stallman refuses to license or pay royalties on pieces of his system, he says he has no choice but to drop a key program from his stable and begin work from scratch on creating a replacement.

The setback has darkened the mood of the usually optimistic Mr. Stallman, who closes conversations with the upbeat phrase, "Happy hacking." And it only reinforces his feeling that the system has to change.

"If things continue like this," he says, "free software is dead. You simply will not be allowed to write useful software, because every such program will infringe."

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Mr. Zachary is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau.