Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
by Sam Williams

When you are doing a biography on a living person, there are usually two ways the subject of the biography reacts; supportive or unsupportive of the biography. But in the case of Richard Stallman, things are different. He cooperates with the biographer on the condition the resulting book is free for all to look at and modify. After much wrangling, this was accepted and the result is a book that paints a portrait of a man who is morally sure of where he stands when it comes to freedom of access to computer code.

The book starts off with a major event in Stallman's life; a jammed printer. It doesn't sound like much, but that event got Stallman thinking about access to the source code of computers. He wanted to modify the printer's code to send out an alert whenever it jammed instead of waiting for somebody to drop by the printer and discover it. But the printer's manufacturer refused to release the source code to him. This got Stallman angry and frustrated and helped to crystalise one of his main principles; computer source code should be available to anybody who wants access to it. Locking it away behind non-disclosure agreements was, in his view, evil.

From there, the books goes back and looks at Stallman's early life. It reveals a person who was very intelligent but socially inept. In hindsight, Stallman believes he may have Asperger's Syndrome, a kind of autism.

Another major event, related to the printer episode, was his introduction to the MIT Lab. There, he shows himself to be very gifted in the art of coding and hacking. But the lab's relaxed attitude towards computer code and personal freedom was to influence Stallman, especially when he was coding one of his major projects: the Emacs environment which was to become a favourite editor (and more) among programmers and was the beginning of what will later become Stallman's most well known creation: the GNU Public License, which gave people the right to view computer code and to modify it as long as people are given the same rights towards your derived code.

The rest of the book is taken up various events, personal and external, to Stallman: the establishment of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman's goal of releasing a totally free operating system ('free' here means 'free as in freedom; not free as in beer'), the rise of the Linux kernel and operating system, which become one of the major GNU components.

The book also looks as the various controversies that surround Stallman, especially the difference between his view and that of "Open Source" which Stallman disagrees with on moral and ethical grounds.

The book ends with a look at the future; many years from now, will Stallman be remembered as a revolutionary or as a forgotten footnote in computer software history? Only time will tell but for the moment, Stallman's influence is large and despite the many disagreements he has with other programmers and developers, the one thing they all agree on is that Stallman is a man whom you should respect for his ethical and moral viewpoints.

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Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams

Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
by Sam Williams