ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT GARY WAGNER

For Richard Stallman, using Free Software is more than a practical choice: it is a moral imperative. Since he founded the Free Software Foundation in 1984 with the goal of writing a free UNIX-like operating system, Stallman has been the driving force behind much of the software that goes into Linux (which, he insists, is more accurately called GNU/Linux).

From his offices at MIT, Stallman has masterminded the development of such important software as GNU Emacs, The GNU C Compiler (GCC), and perhaps most importantly, the GNU General Public License.

But nearly 30 years after the glory days of MIT's AI lab -- the fountainhead of hacker culture where Stallman first cut his teeth as a coder -- software has come to mean more than simply the code that makes computers run.

The 46 year-old Stallman recently met with Linux Magazine's editors to -cuss consumer devices, freedom, the U.S. Constitution, and whether or not he's ever used Microsoft Word.

On hand were Adam Goodman, publisher of Linux Magazine; Matt Welsh, author of O'Reilly's Running Linux; and Linux Magazine contributing writer Lee Gomes.

Linux Magazine: To the extent that you live someplace, where is it? Is it in Cambridge?

Richard M Stallman: Yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

LM: What's your place like?

RMS: Nothing interesting. It's not important. It's a place to sleep. I'd rather live in my office, but they won't let me do that anymore.

LM: But you tried...

RMS: Yes I did. I did that for thirteen years. And if they would let me I'd keep doing it. It's much more convenient.

LM: This was at MIT?

RMS: Yes.

LM: So where did you sleep?

RMS: I had a bed in my office.

LM: And there were showers in the bathroom down the hall?

RMS: Yes. But these are such unimportant, minor things. What's important about me is what I've done. Because that's something that affects other people. This stuff doesn't affect anybody else. It's secondary. I wouldn't mind talking about this, but let's talk about something that matters to people first, and make sure that that's covered, and then I can talk about this too. It's not a secret, it's just that I think it sets the tone in a direction that isn't edifying.

It's like the fascination with trivia games; "Where did Richard Stallman live for thirteen years?"

Focusing on the quirks of an individual doesn't help you make your world better. It can be distracting. In some cases it might even be fascinating, but it's not something that's really important.

LM: Don't you believe that understanding the person helps in understanding that person's work?

RMS: Not really. You might understand something about the person, but the important thing about anybody's work is why it makes a difference to people. That's the most important thing to know.

There is some connection between my work and my personal life in that I've always tried to live cheaply. I've always tried to resist acquiring the expensive habits that many Americans think they ought to acquire. That freed me to choose what I was going to do. Now as it happened, I chose to start a Free Software movement, but if I had wanted to accomplish something else, I would have been free to do that. Because my decisions were not being dictated by money.

LM: What do you think you're like to work with?

RMS: How can I judge it? I think I'm reasonable to work with. Some other people have said I'm not. Can I really be the judge? Obviously not. Because there's a tendency for people to miss some big things about themselves.

I have had disagreements with people. Sometimes I've been stubbornly firm about them. I'm firm about certain things. And I don't go along with other people for the sake of going along.

LM: What kinds of issues won't you compromise on?

RMS: I know what I'm trying to achieve. If a person disagrees with the steps I want to take because that person has different goals, I know that that's not a good reason for me to change my mind. If the person shares my goals, and argues that there's a better way to reach them,...well,... they might be right. I could be mistaken about how to reach the goal. But if a person simply has different goals, there's no argument to be made. It simply counts for nothing.

LM: So you don't wish to try to persuade people with different goals to see things your way?

RMS: I have tried talking to people with various different kinds of views, and I have learned something about it; I am appealing to certain values. People who see something in those values will usually respond to the arguments I make based on those values. People who see nothing will think my arguments are based on false premises, and I certainly won't persuade those people. So what I'm trying to do is show people those values and explain their consequences.

LM: So what values are you trying to present to people, and how do they relate to Free Software?

RMS: Free Software is about giving software users the freedoms that are necessary to treat each other as friends and form a community. This means that you must have the freedom to change a piece of software to do what you want or need it do. You must also be free to redistribute that software so that you can help your neighbor. It follows from there that you must be free to publish an improved version of that software, so that you can share your improvements with other people who can also benefit from it and build on it further. These freedoms provide practical and social benefits, both of which are important.

Most people don't think of software as an area where freedom matters. Why does it make a moral difference? Well, because helping your neighbor is what makes our world a society, instead of a dog-eat-dog jungle. If we want to be part of a society, that means we want to be living with neighbors who will help us out and whom we'll help out. It means having goodwill, sometimes also thought of as civic spirit. It means not looking at everything from the point of view of "What's in it for me?"

Fifteen years ago I had decided I wanted to be part of a community of people who were using exclusively Free Software, so that we were always free to share with each other and work together. But at the time that was impossible, because to use a computer you had to get an operating system, and all the operating systems that worked on modern computers were proprietary. Nobody was allowed to share them and most people couldn't get the source code at all. The only way I could change the situation was to develop another operating system which I could legally encourage everyone to copy and redistribute and change. So that's what I decided to do. I decided to develop a UNIX-compatible operating system and give it the name "GNU." So GNU is first of all the name of this operating system.

Now I didn't expect I would do this all myself of course. I knew that a lot of people would need to help, and that it would be a big project. So I decided to call it the "GNU project", named after the system that its goal was to develop.

UNIX consists of many components and we had to replace them all. But we didn't have to replace them all ourselves. If somebody else wrote a program that would replace some component of UNIX and they made it Free Software, that meant one thing we didn't have to do. Good. It's such a big job. We had to find shortcuts any time we could. Over the years various components were developed by other people, the biggest one being the X Window System. But when we couldn't find a free alternative, we had to develop the components ourselves, or recruit people to develop them.

That's what we did during the 1980s, one component after another, we got them developed and crossed off the list. By the early 1990s, only one of the major essential components was still missing, and that was the kernel.

While we were working on this, Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel and called it Linux and then decided to release it as Free Software. By putting Linux together with the not-quite-complete GNU system and a few other smaller things, you could get a complete free operating system. Of course there was some work involved in making the two parts work together, but by and large, the system that people are using today and often calling Linux is really the GNU system with the program Linux functioning as the kernel.