The Shaggy God

He is, as one might imagine, not the easiest person to get along with. Adjectives commonly used to describe Stallman include "difficult," "enigmatic," and "impossible"—and these are the printable ones. "Let's put it this way: He's not your best salesman," says Eric Raymond, a computer scientist and longtime Stallman antagonist, laughing. "Absolutely not! No! No!"

To begin with, Stallman is not especially presentable. At 55, he has long, disheveled hair, a serious potbelly, and a scraggly beard, and favors loose, baggy clothes. He has the social skills to match. In conversation, he is inclined to idly examine strands of his hair for split ends, and then pop any he finds into his mouth to suck on them. ("A nervous habit," he explains without apology.) A career single, he has made no secret of his desire for a girlfriend, even going so far as to advertise for one recently on Craigslist, which got a lot of Internet play among his enemies. His business card gives an accounting of his personal attributes in the style of an online dating ad: "sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance/tender embraces/unusual sense of humor." (The italics are his.)

Underneath all the hair, Stallman has the soft radiance of a guru, something that emanates from his soulful eyes. "Some people say I look like Jesus," he says, bemused. "But we don't really know how he looked." Cocksure in the manner of the very, very smart, he is given to extreme, self-righteous positions couched in the language of a jeremiad, by which his opponents are not merely mistaken but "evil." If you question his wisdom too assertively, he might exclaim, "Stop, you're making me angry," hoping to close off further discussion. After Stallman launched the Free Software Foundation in 1985, he boned up by reading, twice, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which many of his former admirers would argue he must have read either backward or upside down. His leadership style seems to involve alienating his potential followers.

As when, in 1998—in the free software movement's first big commercial breakthrough—Netscape agreed to reveal 30 million lines of its source code, dubbing the project Mozilla. To capitalize on this success, Stallman believed, the movement should push all the harder. User's manuals should be free, too, just like software! And traitors should be pilloried! At a software conference, Stallman seized the audience microphone and went after one of the panelists, a programmer named John Ousterhout, lambasting him as a "parasite" for marketing a proprietary version of some free software he had created.
In April 1998, when the tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly convened a much hyped summit in Silicon Valley to plot the future of free software, he included more than a dozen heavyweights of the field. Only one big name was missing: Richard Stallman. The movement had exiled its leader.

Brainy and withdrawn, Stallman had the geek's expected interest in math and science from an early age. His mother, a substitute teacher in public schools, was stunned when her son at six glanced over a Scientific American brainteaser that had stumped her and instantly knew the answer. The young Richard was such a bookworm, his mother would have to shout to him nine or 10 times before he'd come to the table for dinner. As headstrong as he was brilliant, he refused to write high school papers because he considered the whole exercise stupid. He was terrified of his quarrelsome father, who worked in the printing business. (His mother had divorced him when Richard was three.) "He never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way," Stallman told his biographer, Sam Williams, in the book Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software.

Stallman didn't encounter his first computer until a summer job at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was 16. He took to programming immediately, as if his mind was hard-wired for it. It gave him a thrilling sense of power. "The idea that you could write down a program that would make a machine do things—that was fascinating," he says. Power was very much on his mind. The Vietnam War was on and Stallman had a paralyzing fear of being drafted. He wasn't afraid of getting shot; he was afraid of basic training, of having to take orders, to salute and do what he was told. Stallman didn't think he could bear any of that. He had "waking fantasies" of being taught how to fire a machine gun—then turning it on his instructors and blowing them away.

Before he arrived at Harvard in 1971, he was asked on a form to describe the ideal roommate. He wrote: "an invisible, inaudible, intangible roommate." Harvard, wisely, placed him in a single all four years. Interested in everything, he majored in physics but also took courses in ancient Middle Eastern history and Chinese. He was irked that he'd eventually be "kicked out" for accumulating four years' worth of passing grades.

The only part of Harvard that Stallman didn't love was the computer science department. He found it "authoritarian," because the professors had the audacity to lock up their precious computer terminals in their offices when he wanted to use them. So he took the subway to MIT's brand-new Artificial Intelligence Lab. Stallman had heard the lab was doing interesting things, so he just showed up one day in the spring of his freshman year. "He was brilliant," says MIT professor Gerald Sussman, who is on the board of Stallman's Free Software Foundation. "He could think very fast and very clearly, cutting to the core of a problem instantly." Stallman did so well that his initials, RMS, which he took as his username, were soon the object of reverence in the computing world, and still are today. (Ask any hard-core computer geek: "RMS" carries profound significance.)

Stallman thrilled to the Hacker Ethic, that contagious spirit of festive, super-smart community that lingered about MIT. (Back then, "hack" meant "hack around," not "hack into.") On the rare occasion when an MIT professor locked up his computer in his office, hackers banded together to find a way to break in. Stallman favored popping loose the ceiling tiles and rotating the doorknob with a length of adhesive tape.

The AI Lab terminals were models of hospitality. Anyone was welcome to log on. Eventually, though, in the late '70s, after Stallman had graduated and joined the lab staff, the system began requiring passwords. Appalled, he told everybody to use the same one—a shared password, after all, being no password at all—but some hackers continued to cling to their individual access codes. Stallman feared the AI Lab was becoming a "totalitarian police state." Worse, as one of the computer system's developers, he would be the Nazi banging on doors demanding to see papers. Things spiraled downward from there. The Department of Defense weighed in with its own security concerns, threatening to eject the lab from the military's Arpanet—the precursor to the Internet—if the lab didn't properly control access to its computers. Defiant, Stallman went on to let anyone use his RMS password for about a decade. The lab administrators finally told him to cut it out. Stallman refused. He ultimately quit using the AI Lab computers altogether. It was a protest of one.