The Shaggy God

Although Stallman was not invited to the big 1998 conference where Silicon Valley honchos officially convened the "freeware" movement, Linus Torvalds did attend. As co-creator of GNU/Linux, he was entitled to a heavy measure of respect. And because he was jovial and easygoing, he was liked, too. For his part, Torvalds was tiring of Stallman's relentless anticapitalism. At the meeting he slyly pointed out that, in English, "free" had two wildly different meanings—free as in no charge, and free as in freedom. Wasn't this confusing to people? The attendees murmured their assent; businesses instinctively recoiled at the thought of giving stuff away. Brainstorming, the group came up with two other possible names: "sourceware" and "open source." The issue proved so momentous, it was put to a vote. Of the 15 attendees, nine voted for the second option. Stallman's movement was officially rebranded. When Forbes wrote about the nascent free software trend in August 1998, it put Torvalds's face on the cover.

"I couldn't call them spineless," Stallman says today of the open sourcers, "because they threw out the idea there ought to be a spine." Eric Raymond, who long ago helped Stallman with one of his projects but turned against him to become the Open Source Initiative's first president, is more measured. "The free software movement was not advancing the interests of the community it was supposed to serve," he says. "They were waving all this idealistic stuff around that basically just frightened the people we needed to convince. Most people don't respond to idealistic musings. You have to change their behavior first. But Richard just screams when I say these things to him. It threatens his world view." The two men are so distrustful that they routinely copy each other on any e-mail that mentions either by name, in the spirit of full antagonistic disclosure. So Raymond's first e-mail to me about Stallman prompted a lengthy retort from Stallman, and then it went Raymond-Stallman-Raymond for several more rounds, until finally they started battering each other directly, leaving me out of it. This must have continued for some time; many days later I received a plaintive e-mail from Stallman with the subject heading: "Did you find me offensive?"

Despite the feeble squalling, Stallman, a decade after being snubbed by his peers, has left his mark on the world, in ways greater than his former allies. Many of the principal Internet languages—like Perl and Python, for example—utilize free software. Indeed, the Internet itself, where so much is available for free, operates according to its spirit. Sendmail, one of the most popular computer programs on the planet, is free software; so is BIND, the system by which those impossible numeric IP addresses are converted to names like YouTube and Amazon. The Web browser Firefox—second in popularity only to Microsoft's Internet Explorer—uses free software. It was to catch some of the free software audience that Microsoft made a $44.6 billion lunge for Yahoo's "zero dollar" customers this winter, and Google, with its acres of servers, could not exist without the stuff: The company would otherwise be unable to pay for the countless copies of operating systems it relies on. And Apple's iPhone 2.0 this spring will offer a raft of free applications; the move is seen as revolutionary, the latest sign of Steve Jobs's genius.

Then there's Richard Stallman. His own personal territory is pretty much as it was when he first arrived at MIT—only that cramped office, no more. His ideas, like his travels, have had their reach, but his solitude remains profound. When we went to lunch one day, he led me up the sidewalk to an Asian place he liked, and he strode purposefully 10 feet ahead of me the whole way. Stallman is clear on where he wants to go, and how to get there, but not so good at bringing others along with him. Way up front, he is free to chart whatever course he wishes, but it's just him up there. Freedom, it turns out, is a lonely place to be.