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Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade
Free as in Freedom is a generally sympathetic but far from hagiographic biography of Richard Stallman, inspiration of the free software movement. While much of the material in it will be familiar to anyone actively involved with free software, there are, as Williams claims, "facts and quotes in here that one won't find in any Slashdot story or Google search." It is also an entertaining and accessible study, which I finished within a day of my review copy arriving.
Williams begins with the famous jamming printer and Stallman's encounter with a non-disclosure agreement that prevented him writing reporting software for it. He then jumps forwards to a speech given by Stallman in 2001, responding to attacks by Microsoft on the GNU GPL. Having used these episodes to introduce Stallman and explain the basic idea of free software, the rest of the work continues in a similar vein, mixing historical chapters with ones describing Williams' own meetings with Stallman.
Chapter three describes Stallman's childhood as a prodigy; chapter four his experiences at Harvard and MIT; chapter six the MIT AI Lab and the Emacs "commune"; chapter seven the death of the MIT hacker community and the first announcement of the GNU Project; chapter nine the GNU GPL; chapter ten the appearance of Linux and debates over GNU/Linux; and chapter eleven the coining of the term "open source" and the arguments over that. These contain quotes by everyone from Stallman's mother to the leading lights of free software, as well as plenty by Stallman himself. The narrative never strays too far from its subject, but becomes inextricably interwoven with the broader history and politics of free software and sometimes digresses to cover key figures and events with which Stallman wasn't directly involved.
Williams' first-hand accounts help give Stallman a human face: chapter five recounts a meeting in 1999 LinuxWorld, chapter eight a meeting in Hawaii, and chapter twelve a frustrating car trip with Stallman at the wheel. These give a feel for Stallman's personality and presence, his forthrightness and emotional intensity, his steadfastness and his abrasiveness, and his ability to unsettle. Chapter thirteen attempts to predict Stallman's status "in 100 years," quoting opinions from from Eben Moglen, John Gilmore, Eric Raymond, and Lawrence Lessig; it also suggests that Stallman's personality may be inseparable from his achievements.
Although I was already involved with free software advocacy, my first encounter with Richard Stallman came when he turned up to a rehearsal of my gamelan group; afterwards I tried without much success to explain to my fellow musicians just how important the strange bearded man they'd just met was. I don't think Free as in Freedom would help much with that: it jumps around too much and assumes too much general knowledge of the computer industry to be a good introduction for complete outsiders. Those already interested in the history and politics of free software and hacker culture, however, should relish it.
In an epilogue Williams talks about the writing of Free as in Freedom and the choice of copyright license. Despite the big fuss made about it being released under the GNU Free Documentation License, however, only a sample chapter is available online now and the rest will not, apparently, be put online until June. (This is not a violation of the OFDL, because Williams as copyright holder can allow O'Reilly to distribute the book in any way they like.) So if you don't want to buy a printed copy, you can either wait three months or hope someone OCRs the book sooner.
You can purchase Free as in Freedom from Barnes & Noble, read chapter three online, or check out Danny's 600 other book reviews. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.
While I thought this book was well written and thoroughly interesting, it definitely needed a better copyeditor. There were frequent typos (in one confusing case it states that the first version of GNU Emacs was released in 1996!) and mispellings. For one of the first in-depth, published profiles of such an important individual in the history (albeit breif history) of free software/open source, I would have expected a bit more care on O'Reilly's part. That said, it is well worth the read, as it gives a pretty balanced take on RMS.
Try "hagiography" as your search term. It's a biography of a saint.
I wish Larry Wall would get more involved in promoting the general idea of open source. Larry would be so much easier for government and corporate types to accept, and he certainly has a solid reputation in the open source world. This is not to say anything about ESR or RMS, just that L?W would make an excellent addition to the public relations efforts of open source.
Miko O'Sullivan
Richard Stallman will be giving a talk on 'Software patents: obstacles to software development' on the 25th of March in Cambridge. I expect he will talk with reference to _all_ software developers, not just free software, because he has said in the past that both free and proprietary software developers have a common interest here.
That's Cambridge, Cambridgeshire rather than Cambridge, MA BTW. Send mail to rmstalk@fipr.org for details.
This is important right now because of the proposed EU patent directive; it would be good for the mainstream press to attend.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I will not retract my statement. RMS wants all software code to be open under terms such as GPL. The code is the ONLY THING that a small company or independant programmer owns. And I think they have the right to own that code and keep it private if they so choose.
Again, factually incorrect. Stallman and the FSF have always supported the right of authors to keep their code private and not release it at all. In fact, the FSF objected to Apple's license for the free portions of OSX, because the license said that the source code had to be made available for any deployed version of the software, rather than any published version of the software. Stallman has always held that authors should have the right to keep their code private if they wish.
What Stallman and the FSF object to is publishing/selling software and then restricting the freedom of those you sell it to to use it how they wish.
You're zero for two so far, buddy. If you're interested in debating Stallman's opinions, I suggest you do some reading and find out what they actually are.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Probably referring to this. Specifically (ripped from site):
In 1971, as a freshman at Harvard University, Stallman became a hacker at the MIT AI Laboratory. In the 1980s, the hacker culture which was Stallman's life began to dissolve under the pressure of the commercialization of the software industry. In particular, other AI Lab hackers founded the company Symbolics, which actively attempted to replace the free software in the Lab with its own proprietary software. For two years, from 1983 to 1985, Stallman single-handedly duplicated the efforts of the Symbolics programmers to prevent them from gaining a monopoly on the Lab's computers.(Emphasis mine)