HIGH
TIMES MAGAZINE (OCTOBER 2004)
THE CODE WAR
Richard Stallman Leads the Free Software Revolution
BY DAVID BIENENSTOCK
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of
evil to one who is striking at the root.” —Henry
David Thoreau
Richard Stallman first wandered into the artificial-intelligence
lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971,
an 18-year-old Harvard undergrad asking around for surplus
programming manuals. He walked out the same day with a new
job, and entrée into the epicenter of an emerging revolution
in computer science. Best of all, everything was free.
“To help people understand the word free in
the correct way, I often say, ‘Think of free speech,
not free beer,’” Stallman explains. “Free
software means the user has certain crucial freedoms, including
freedom to run the program for any legitimate purpose, freedom
to control the program by studying the source code and changing
it to do what you want, freedom to cooperate with others by
redistributing copies of the program and freedom to publish
improved versions.”
Free Software was a way of life for Stallman at MIT. He worked
on early operating systems alongside the greatest minds in
the field, sharing code, technique and a community united
in seeking utility from computers. Ironically, the first sign
of trouble—the dead canary in the mineshaft—came
in the form of a “free” laser printer. The machine,
an early prototype, was a gift from Xerox, but the code that
ran it was a proprietary trade secret. So when the printer
crashed, there was no way to fix it—even if you just
so happened to be one of the world’s foremost experts
in computer programming.
“The problems were the result of the fact that we were
helpless. Our hands were tied.” Stallman recalls. “I
was able to see free software as a way of life that was worth
defending.”
The corporate alternative to free software—a wired world
run by code the public can not examine, alter or understand,
has come to pass. Imagine buying a car and being told that
not only is it illegal to look under the hood, but that the
manufacturer reserves the right to change the engine at any
time, to take your keys away for any reason and to track (and/or
limit) the places you can drive. (Microsoft used to ask, “Where
do you want to go today?” More fitting: “Go here,
or else.”)
Now imagine an election where you can’t see the code
that counts the vote. A browser that reports your Web surfing
to the government. A word processor that secretly scans your
unfinished manifesto...
Clearly seeing, and fearing, this future, Stallman resigned
from MIT in January 1984 to begin the GNU Project, bringing
together programmers from around the world to create the first
operating system compatible with the philosophy of free software.
Stallman left MIT’s payroll but never left Cambridge,
Mass., where he currently resides in a rented third-floor
bedroom, undecorated and furnished with a computer table and
a single bed. HIGH TIMES met with him there, two hours before
his address to an associate members’ meeting of the
Free Software Foundation, which he founded in 1985 to raise
money and awareness for the cause.
Starting GNU was “a revolutionary act,” according
to Stallman, “an escape from a system of domination
and subjugation.”
“To make your computer do anything, you need an operating
system, and all the operating systems available for modern
computers in 1983 were proprietary. I wanted to change that,
but I couldn’t change it with a lobbying campaign.”
Instead, he undertook a strategy of propaganda by the deed.
“I have a lot of skill writing software, so I figured
I could change the situation by writing an operating system.
And this way it would be possible to use a computer system
in freedom.”
GNU was completed in the early 90’s, but it lacked a
kernel, the lowest-level component of an operating system,
which allocates the machine’s resources among all the
higher-level functions. Around the same time, Linus Torvalds
had developed a kernel called Linux, which he initially sought
to protect, but eventually released as free software, in 1992.
Programmers quickly combined GNU with Linux to create a fully
functioning operating system, GNU/Linux, which most people
now know simply as Linux—a semantic oversight that obscures
the very existence of the free-software movement that made
it all possible.
“There were a group of people who promoted the system
because they liked it technically, but they never particularly
thought about the issue of freedom,” says Stallman,
who was not involved in combining GNU and Linux. “People
tended to look at Linus Torvalds as if he’d developed
the whole thing, and he doesn’t agree with the political
ideas of the GNU project. He thinks technical decisions should
be made on technical grounds alone.”
On technical grounds, of course, free software is impractical
for many people. Free programs are available for many tasks
(word processing, e-mail, Web publishing, etc.), but they
can be far from user-friendly, and don’t always play
nicely with the proprietary systems that are ubiquitous (including
the one here at HIGH TIMES). Stallman, however, sees these
distinctions not just in technical and political terms, but
also in moral terms. For him, free software is a basic human
right in the 21st century and perhaps as important to the
cause of freedom as free speech was in the last century. “People
who don’t value their freedom will lose it. Look at
how much freedom we’ve lost in the US in three years.
. . . I don’t hate people just because they use non-free
software, I know that they’re more victims than victimizers,
but they are playing a role in perpetuating this system, and
I think they should stop.”
Meanwhile, the open-source movement, which developed among
Linux devotees, offers a far more moderate approach: courting
new converts with the promise of lower costs, increased efficiency
and many of the “freedoms” demanded by the Free
Software Foundation (without any of the underlying philosophy).
To Microsoft and other giants of the industry, open source’s
business-friendly approach represents a far more serious threat
than Richard Stallman’s revolution. Linux has already
been embraced and implemented by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and
Google—not to mention Communist China.
Rest assured, Bill Gates has been paying attention. On the
international front, he’s been lecturing the developing
world on the danger of free and open-source software, a position
loudly echoed by US trade representatives and hardwired into
multinational free-trade agreements. Microsoft has also been
fighting for its market share at home, actively supporting
the litigious assault on all things Linux by the SCO Group,
which claims Linux uses code swiped from Unix, their earlier
proprietary system. Employing a tactic developed by the music
industry, SCO has been randomly targeting Linux users for
lawsuits, starting with DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone.
“Microsoft appears to be funding SCO to make outrageous
lawsuits with the goal of scaring users away from free software.
They have power and they want to maintain it.” Stallman
explains. “The real threat is not if they win these
suits, which seems very unlikely. The real threat is from
software patents, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and
other laws that actually prohibit the use of free software
to do specific jobs,” like playing a DVD, for starters.
HIGH TIMES asked Stallman if a war might eventually be fought
over code, the way we’ve fought over gold, religion
and oil.
“I don’t think even Bush would go to war over
something like this, but economic conflict, yes. It’s
part of a larger economic conflict between the governments
that are in the empire and subservient to the global corporations,
and those that are trying to resist.”
And who will win?
“How should I know? When people are fighting for freedom,
it’s a silly question to ask who will win. Imagine visiting
Gandhi, George Washington or Nelson Mandela and asking, ‘Who’s
going to win this fight?’ It presumes that the outcome
is decided, so what it says to the republic is, ‘Don’t
bother getting involved.’”
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