Richard Stallman's adversaries paint him as a rogue idealist, the Don Quixote of the information age perpetually tilting at the three-bladed windmill of copyright, corporation and capitalism. Stallman, writes O'Reilly & Associates scion Thomas Scoville, is "a fanatic with an unrealistic, uncompromising vision" (but that's okay, he whinges, the dude wrote emacs, give him props). "Hackers" author Steven Levy walks an uncertain line between reverence and mockery in his epilogue, "The Last of the True Hackers," a startlingly prescient "making of" document on GNU and Stallman's MIT years.
Painted into a corner, then, it's not surprising to see the crusader on the defensive, like at the ideological debacle of last year's O'Reilly-sponsored Open Source Developer's Day (yes, kids, that's Open Source, not Free Software -- care for some salt on that wound?) While I'm not sure if the decision to bring Stallman aboard the panel was born of admiration or from fear, half the reason I went in the first place was to see the fireworks. Tim O'Reilly must have realized this was a major draw as well; as it was, they had to prostitute the event to the previous day's conference's Perl developers just to fill the place with enough warm bodies to wear all the Abisource T-shirts.
Stallman was in fine form, making his first appearance not on his designated panel, but in the audience Q&A period, where he was TCLed pink to rake Scriptics founder John Ousterhout over the coals for his relatively compromising interpretation of the Open Source Business Model (with Mr. O'Reilly moderating, no less). Scriptics, he elaborated, was leeching off the free software community and endangering its base by making enhancements and desired functionality on top of the open-source TCL distribution proprietary.
So here's a guy who doesn't play by the rules, even when he's an honored guest. What Stallman lacks in poise and grooming (he resembles, in many ways, the exotic beast on the GNU logo -- but in fairness, we should note the disarmingly anthropomorphic features of Eric S. "I am the Walrus" Raymond), he makes up for in boisterousness, and he's not wrong, just impolite and impolitic.
Contrast that with O'Reilly, the suave, debonaire publishing magnate, one of the few exceptions to those conference-room inhabitants, including myself, who would never have made it through the hotel lobby without a "Hello, My Name Is..." pin. Without his generous servings of tact the conference would have derailed right then and there. But his earnest showmanship could not subdue the unpleasant fact that geek war had been declared, and we were all on the front lines.
Raymond's goal -- one supported by open source luminaries such as O'Reilly and Linus Torvalds -- is to engineer an open-source revolution from the inside; Stallman, ever the idealist, sees free software as part of a radically different order which may be able to coexist with, but fundamentally cannot be integrated with, modern-day capitalism.
In his essay, Scoville points to AT&T as ultimately responsible for engendering the open-source philosophy, but the claim can be made that it has its roots in the academic tradition that began in the Renaissance. AT&T, Stallman, Raymond and O'Reilly haven't invented open source -- they are merely the first, or most vocal, to apply the proto-industrial academic tradition to the information age.
Meanwhile, the role of that academic tradition has, in the last century, and particularly in the U.S., been largely subverted to the whim of large corporations. The free exchange of information, even in the strictly academic sense, is anathema to Wall Street, and thus Raymond's approach: let's sneak in under the radar with a kinder, gentler free software. Goo goo g'joob, indeed.
Stallman, instead, seeks to overthrow the system entirely. While Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazaar" talks about computer code, Stallman's "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" is about a moral code. And even those who would crown him king of the introverts cannot ignore the fact that RMS's prose is philosophically holistic, right down to his notes on the Indonesian government's human rights violations in East Timor embedded within the Java page on the GNU web site.
To dismiss Stallman as "unrealistic" belies the greater truth that the notion of "realistic" has nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with the trappings and entrapments of corporate-sponsored socio-economic conditions as they stand today. Raymond and others may be missing the mark as they attempt to find a niche for open source in a proprietary world, a move which may ultimately relegate free software, like academic freedom, to a line item in the GNP.
Next episode: Capably skewering the monopolist's ambitions
Wes Biggs
wes@onion.net