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| A Fan Of Freedom |
(Read the 調書をとる／予約する here).
Sam Williams's biography of Richard M. Stallman, 解放する／自由な As In Freedom, is one of the most （疑いを）晴らす-注目する，もくろむd and 極度の慎重さを要する biographies I have ever read. I have known RMS since we were teenage SF fans 支援する in the 中央の 1970s. I've met his family. I've 共同製作するd with RMS and argued with him and hung out with him for more than twenty-five years. For all that events since 1998 have 軍隊d us into a sort of 競争, RMS and I remain の中で each others' oldest friends. Still, this 調書をとる／予約する helped me understand him better.
That needs to be said at the start, because I'm going to spend a lot of the 残り／休憩（する） of this essay 非難するing FAIF. This 批評 isn't ーするつもりであるd to be 敵意を持った. Sam Williams's 見解／翻訳／版 of RMS's story is, in my opinion, not wrong so much as it is 行方不明の some 決定的な 視野, some of which I hope to 供給（する） in this essay. I'm giving it this 成果／努力 正確に because I think the 調書をとる／予約する is of high 質, and 価値（がある） the best amplification and critique that I can （判決などを）下す both as a historian and as a friend of RMS.
And yes, the 調書をとる／予約する helped me understand my own history better, too. There are 平行のs between my life and Richard's that I didn't understand the 十分な significance of until Williams's narration 押し進めるd me to think about how unusual those 株d experiences are. So this essay is going to be a little about me, too. Sam has been 脅すing to do my biography next...
When Sam sent me the FAIF manuscript in 草案, a first reading quickly 明らかにする／漏らすd that it had a problem I had 推定する／予想するd, one that has dogged all accounts of Richard's career since Steven 徴収する's Hackers in the 1980s. The author has been in part seduced by his 支配する — he has bought into too much of the mythology RMS created around himself.
I suppose it's difficult to 避ける this 罠（にかける） with RMS. He is an intensely charismatic man who has refashioned his entire life around a Big Message. He has a 傾向 to 事業／計画（する） the 運動 and certainties of his later self, the fully developed 改革運動家/evangelist, 支援する on to his earlier years. RMS's account of his own 開発 tends to be 簡素化するd, narratized. Not 誤った, but tending to pass lightly over the 誤った starts and 不確定s and growing 苦痛s and hesitations that were 明白な to those of us that knew him way 支援する when.
It's diagnostic that Richard can no longer 解任する with certainty the year or the other person 伴う／関わるd in the CMU printer-driver 出来事/事件 that 始める，決める him on the path to "解放する／自由な ソフトウェア". Once the story had been 吸収するd into Richard's personal narrative of prophecy, struggle, and 使節団, the actual time and circumstances of the story became unimportant to him and forgettable.
The "real" story of RMS, or at least the story I 証言，証人／目撃するd, is a bit いっそう少なく epic and more human. I can remember a Richard who hadn't 人物／姿／数字d out what he was about yet, a 公正に／かなり ordinary-looking young man with short(!) hair who between 1977 and 1980 or so chased several of my girlfriends and (にもかかわらず RMS's later 報告（する）／憶測 of his 一貫した 欠如（する） of success with women) caught at least two of them. I don't see that Richard in Sam's 調書をとる／予約する. Instead, going on RMS's 報告（する）／憶測, FAIF has given us something that is 大部分は the RMS-認可するd 見解／翻訳／版 of his earlier self.
Perhaps it could not have been さもなければ; I いつかs wonder if even RMS knows the difference any more. All of us narratize our lives; we all reinvent our own histories to some extent. But one of the 危険，危なくするs of reinventing yourself as a prophet/visionary is that you can 結局最後にはーなる forgetting who you were before the 見通し. It's a 可能性 that has worried me about my own life since fame was more or いっそう少なく thrust on me in 1998.
Richard's reinvention of himself began twenty years before this was an 問題／発行する for me. It was already 井戸／弁護士席 under way when, a year before the GNU Manifesto was 問題／発行するd in 1985, Steven 徴収する 述べるd RMS as "the last true hacker". That's an unhelpful myth, about which I've been annoyed with 徴収する ever since. At 最小限, it should read "the MIT hacker community's last standing 生存者".
This is more than a historical trivium. I was a hacker at the time, and I knew many others. We were not at all 影響する／感情d by the "象徴的なs War" that so scarred Richard because the ground we were standing on was different — we were Unix guys. We wouldn't get 本気で 傷つける by commercialization until a few years later after the AT&T divestiture. The MIT group was important, but they were not the only hackers in the world. 徴収する's hagiography of Stallman 暗黙に consigned the 残り／休憩（する） of us to the memory 穴を開ける.
Richard's own 傾向 to 強調する the printer-driver 出来事/事件 over the consequences of the 象徴的なs War tends to downplay the cultural 状況 in which he operated — one consisting not 単に of other MIT hackers such as Steele, Gosper, Abelson, Moon, et. al. but of hackers in other traditions — the Unix guys, the Xerox PARC （人が）群がる, the SAIL group.
Sam took 徴収する's "last true hacker" description out of the FAIF 草案 when I explained why it was 偽の. But the narrative bias that goes with it, 特に the 傾向 to portray Stallman as the 単独の link between what （機の）カム before him and the 地位，任命する-1985 hacker culture, is still 現在の. The real untold story here isn't Richard's individual 開発 of a sense of 使節団 — that prophet-out-of-the-砂漠 tale has been rehearsed way too many times. It's the way in which RMS's choices grew organically from a hacker culture that already 存在するd, and which 知らせるd RMS's values and the 範囲 of his choices on many levels.
I can remember that pre-Stallman 時代. Most of the 残り／休憩（する） of us old-timers have given up trying to remind the world that the hacker culture did not in fact 崩壊（する） in 1980-1983 only to spring from RMS's brow reborn with the GNU manifesto; I いつかs feel like a last 抵抗 myself on this one :-). But RMS's choice to model the GNU operating system on Unix 反映するs on a technical level the cultural fact of a pre-存在するing community.
In FAIF, Sam 引用するs Rich Morin: "The community reaction [to the GNU manifesto] was pretty much uniform. People said, 'Oh, that's a 広大な／多数の／重要な idea. Show us your code. Show us it can be done.'" He's 権利; that's how we all felt. I remember thinking that GNU seemed like a 広大な／多数の／重要な idea, but that this shaggy dude I knew from SF 条約s seemed an ありそうもない 候補者 to carry it off. He wasn't one of us. He wasn't a Unix guy.
Richard drew much more from that culture than he seems to remember nowadays. I myself was the person who first 示唆するd to him, at a Boskone in 1983, that Emacs せねばならない be the GNU 事業／計画（する）'s first 製品. We'd been friends for nearly five years by that time. It is utterly characteristic of RMS that he says he doesn't remember that conversation, but believes my 報告（する）／憶測 that it happened. As with the printer-driver 出来事/事件, once the idea had been assimilated into his personal sense of 使節団, the circumstances under which it formed became irrelevant.
And it's not just RMS's cultural 状況 の中で 早期に hackers that FAIF tends to 行方不明になる, but his formative experiences の中で SF fans as 井戸／弁護士席. Again, one of the most 利益／興味ing things about RMS's story is the 尊敬（する）・点s in which it is not unique, but 代表者／国会議員 of 主題s which recur 絶えず in the lives of people like us. For "people like us" read "gifted-to-genius geekboys who acculturated within SF fandom and closely 関係のある subcultures in the 1970s and 1980s".
Seth Breidbart, who Sam 引用するs and who I've known as long as I've known Richard, is another member of this cohort. So is Don Hopkins, who RMS credits with inventing the 称する，呼ぶ／期間／用語 "copyleft". Either could tell you that the constant punning, the little mindfucks like the "弾こうする God" button, the painstaking 倫理的な 推論する／理由ing, the particular 肉親，親類d of emotional 不確定 RMS is prey to, and many other 署名 traits Sam ascribes to RMS as an individual were 現実に considered pretty normal and unsurprising where we （機の）カム from.
Even the 手渡す-kissing. Richard probably 選ぶd up that gesture from people in the Society for Creative Anachronism, same as I did. I still do it いつかs when I'm at SF 条約s. It's within the envelope of normal 行為 there.
And beyond 手渡す-kissing — Richard's "love but not monogamy" credo is not the individual 発明 Sam portrays it as either; it 反映するs the values and practices of the first community in which Richard 設立する a social niche. The practice of polyamory has been ありふれた の中で SF fans since I became 伴う／関わるd with fandom in the 中央の-1970s, though it would not be 指名するd or develop an explicit ideology until the 中央の-1990s. Whether Richard himself remembers that he 借りがあるs this 面 of his values at least partly to his history in SF fandom or has 許すd himself to forget it is an 利益／興味ing question — and one that 平行のs his 関係 to the hacker culture at large.
We were all of us misfits out to 弾こうする God. 反逆者／反逆するs against mundanity, stupidity, the ordinary. We wore short hair when the fashion was long and long when the fashion was short. Like RMS, we were — and are still — essentially compelled to go where intellect and imagination and 倫理的な 有罪の判決 leads us, 関わりなく whether that's comfortable or socially 許容できる.
What distinguishes RMS (and myself) from Seth Beidbart and Don Hopkins and Alan Walker and 示す Miller and other members of this pack is not that our character is essentially different, nor even that our ability is やむを得ず greater. It's just that, for whatever 推論する／理由s of historical 事故, RMS and I went public with it. We have 事業／計画（する）d our 利益／興味s and personalities outside the subcultural 発生地s in which they are considered normal.
All of us more or いっそう少なく always 推定する／予想するd people to find our intellects impressive, but I'm often bemused at the extent to which our other 株d traits strike people as exceptional. What other way is there for us to be? What else could we be but driven, rigidly 倫理的な, ruthlessly analytical, anti-権威主義者, idealistic, careless of normal social rewards, countersuggestible, etc., etc. It's in our wiring. We're self-analytical, too; we can see that wiring. We have little choice in what we are.
Maybe we all have Asperger's Syndrome. Like RMS, we tend to consider the prospect dispassionately and somewhat dismissively (his 傾向 to be unsparing and 臨床の about his own problems, when he 認めるs them at all, is also typical of our 肉親，親類d). Labels are just labels, and the 境界 between normality and aberration is one we are accustomed to thinking of as fluid and often a 事柄 of 鮮明度／定義.
In fact, from RMS's point of 見解（をとる） it's the 残り／休憩（する） of the world that is broken. Bereft of either his intellect or his moral 見通し, ‘normal’ people つまずく through 決まりきった仕事 lives, never waking up to the larger 問題／発行するs that でっちあげる，人を罪に陥れる their 存在, and yet somehow 製図／抽選 from each other animal 慰安s that are mostly 否定するd him. All of us felt that way in the darkest passages of our adolescences; it went with the 領土, as surely as knowing what a glider gun was, and 存在 able to sing Tom Lehrer lyrics from memory, and reading 科学の American and thinking the Mensa 実験（する） was a pretty good joke. Richard, more than any of us, stayed there into his adult life.
The parallelisms go beyond just psychology or 態度s, though. It was pretty normal for us to fling ourselves prodigy-like at mathematics or science, find we 欠如（する）d either the discipline and 成熟 or some other 質 needed to make it there at the level of our aspirations, and 落ちる 支援する on programming instead. Like Richard, I aspired to be a mathematician — gave a 研究 paper at an AMS 会議／協議会 before I 卒業生（する）d high school, took grad-level courses as a college freshman — but 燃やすd out. Others in our cohort could doubtless tell 類似の stories. But like Richard, we have all tended, then and now, to pass over 失敗 lightly in telling our histories. We, even more than most people, because we were afflicted by the sense that we should not have failed.
Like Richard, I too stopped working on proprietary ソフトウェア after 1985. But I was 静かな about it where he was noisy. He had 設立する his 旗，新聞一面トップの大見出し／大々的に報道する, his ideology, his place to stand; it would be another １０年間 before I 設立する 地雷. In the 合間, I argued with his. I felt the same 苦痛 he did; I knew there was something monstrously wrong about a ソフトウェア-生産／産物 system that 疎遠にするd me from the 製品 of my creativity, buried my work under secrecy and bad 管理／経営 決定／判定勝ち（する）s. But I thought Richard's anti-propertarian dream was crazy, a nightmare that would lead to 餓死するing programmers and no good result. We had a number of late-night arguments at 条約s over this.
The others in our cohort who had become programmers adapted better than Richard and I did, settling into 従来の 職業s. One of us 対処するd by taking lots of hallucinogens, a 目だつ exception の中で a group that (like Richard and myself) had 一般に stayed 厳密に （疑いを）晴らす of 麻薬s even when they were socially 許容できる in the 1970s. Another one became a guru of such inaccessible fearsomeness that his bosses at the New York 財政上の house where he worked dared not mess with him.
One way or another, the 残り／休憩（する） of us created 環境s around ourselves that enabled us to 避ける or 避ける the central problem RMS was grappling with — how to 直す／買収する，八百長をする the proprietary-ソフトウェア system that was 鎮圧するing the creative life out of us? We couldn't 調印する on to Richard's eccentric messianism. We knew him too 井戸／弁護士席. We were too much like him. But I think we all felt the same 苦痛 he did at around the same time in our lives.
Again, my 主題 here is that Richard's experience was nowhere 近づく as exceptional as FAIF makes it sound. Many of the brightest hackers all over the world were coming, in their individual ways, to the same cusp point. Richard's genius was that he exteriorized his personal 旅行 as a 計画（する） for a movement, then mythologized it and took it on the road — 供給するing a model for me when I felt it necessary to do the same thing ten years later. It could have been any of us, though. Could have been Seth, or Alan, or Don, or Oz, or 示す, or Karl, or かもしれない any of a half-dozen other geekboy geniuses I knew in SF fandom whose 指名するs have escaped me.
FAIF 引用するs Stallman as follows: "I was there, and no one else as far as I could tell was going to do it," 解任するs Stallman. "So I had to do it. I was elected." While it took individual 見通し and moral courage to 行為／法令／行動する out this feeling as 完全に as Richard did, the sense of 義務, of 存在 elected by the fact of one's own 能力 wouldn't have surprised any hacker of that day or today. Hackers often 反応する like this. See something that needs doing, do it — don't count the cost. In this 尊敬（する）・点 as in many others, RMS was as much a 製品 of the hacker culture as a shaper of it.
I don't say these things to take anything away from Richard. just to place him in the 状況 that FAIF is 行方不明の. He did 行為／法令／行動する. He did change the world, if not perhaps in the exact direction and degree he ーするつもりであるd. RMS put his stamp on the hacker culture so pervasively that it is いつかs difficult to tell where Richard's reinvention of himself ends and the cultural matrix around him begins. I admired him 大いに for that even as I 同意しないd with him, having no 手がかり（を与える） that within a few years I would be doing the same sort of thing myself.
And that points up perhaps the biggest difference between us, beyond theory or ideology. Richard would never have 述べるd himself the way Linus Torvalds and I later did, as 偶発の 革命のs. Linus and I had to be dragged into that 役割 and we still aren't 完全に comfortable with it, but for the man who became RMS, it was purposeful 革命 from the beginning. Because when you're a genius in the secularized-ユダヤ人の tradition that produced Spinoza and Marx, that's what you do — you 掴む on a big moral idea and redeem the world with it.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies, one of the continuing 主題s is the peculiar 力／強力にする of myth. Stories 掴む people and nearly 強要する them to 行為／法令／行動する out a predestined 演劇; courage, on the Discworld, often consists in breaking out of the script. Pratchett, of course, was 反映するing in a fantastic way the human 勧める to make narrative sense out of life, for human 活動／戦闘 to have meaning and 陰謀（を企てる）s to have 決意／決議s. Pratchett's novels are immensely popular の中で hackers.
FAIF buys the whole script for RMS's 演劇, the eremite hero/prophet whose individual moral 見通し and self-殉教／苦難 changes the world. That story-line 要求するs that, にもかかわらず 激しい 苦しむing and 拒絶, the prophet's 見通し 最終的に 勝利 — the greater the 苦しむing, the more 完全にする the 結局の victory. So FAIF 要求するs the canonical ending — that RMS's "星／主役にする has grown", that his moral crusade is stronger today than it has ever been.
The facts are さもなければ. The 失敗 of the GNU 事業／計画（する） at its central goal (生産／産物 of the HURD kernel) became 否定できない in 1995-1996, and as a result RMS has been 刻々と losing 影響（力） to others since then. In 1995 nobody could even 指名する anyone but Stallman with a 信頼できる （人命などを）奪う，主張する to lead the hackers. Now, all but the hardest-核心 FSF 支持者s would 階級 Linus Torvalds above him in 影響（力）, a good many would 追加する Larry 塀で囲む to that 名簿（に載せる）／表（にあげる）, and not a few would 追加する me.
As an 索引 of the change, do a Google 攻撃する，衝突する count on the 条件 "open source" and "解放する／自由な ソフトウェア" (with "GNU or GPL or FSF or Stallman") as qualifiers; this is a phrase 悪名高くも 傾向がある to 誤った 肯定的なs. Then count pages that 言及／関連 both. Now think about the results. I 成し遂げるd this 実験（する） twice, in late 2001 and September 2002 (later 人物／姿／数字s would not be 類似の, as Google changed the 実施 of its search 支配するs in 早期に 2003):
| 称する，呼ぶ／期間／用語 | 2001 | 2002 |
| open source | 2,860,000 | 3,020,000 |
| 解放する／自由な ソフトウェア | 1,330,000 | 1,890,000 |
| both | 2,010,000 | 2,660,000 |
| 解放する／自由な ソフトウェア only | 850,000 | 360,000 |
| % of total | 38% | 16% |
In other words, the number of webpages that 是認する RMS's "解放する／自由な ソフトウェア" label and his 拒絶 to countenance "open source" dropped from 38% to 16% of the whole 始める，決める during that year, and not just in market 株 but in 絶対の numbers 同様に. This was a 天然のまま 実験（する）, but it fits what I 観察する on my travels. It's not a picture of burgeoning success, or even of a long march to victory. The community has spoken. RMS's 宣伝 策略 have been 設立する wanting and 大部分は abandoned for more 効果的な ones.
その上に, RMS 明白に agrees with me that the "解放する／自由な ソフトウェア" message seems in the 過程 of 存在 完全に （太陽，月の）食／失墜d by the "open source" message to which he 反対するs so vociferously. He complains about this 絶えず in public interviews, and in 最近の years has a 傾向 to get emotional and upset about it whenever we're in the same room.
Once again FAIF seems to be ignoring the facts of the 状況／情勢 in 好意 of a storyline that makes RMS the 孤独な mythic redeemer 運命にあるd to 勝利 against a Philistine world. Reality is more コンビナート／複合体 than that; indeed, it is more コンビナート／複合体 than that 38%-to-16% 減少（する） 示すd by 天然のまま content 分析 might 示唆する. Because there is indeed a sense in which RMS is winning, but not at the exact game he 手配中の，お尋ね者 to play.
RMS's artifacts — ペルシャ湾岸協力会議, Emacs, the GNU General Public License — really have changed the world. The 過程 of open, collaborative 開発 he did so much to help invent is 勝利ing. His code and his license have 後継するd; it is only his rhetoric and moralizing that have failed. The 悲劇 is that RMS himself values his moralizing more than his code.
Had it not been so, had RMS been a bit いっそう少なく 消費するd by his big moral idea and a bit better salesman, the hacker culture would not have landed on me the 職業 of 説 what he could not. I might have been a fully paid-up member of his crusade, rather than winding up as an unwilling 競争相手.
I often think I would have preferred that 結果. Perhaps then RMS's story would have had the happy, redemptive 結果 FAIF 事業／計画（する）s. But that's not the history we got. Instead, I think RMS will never be 満足させるd with the victory he gets, even as it transforms the world.