Richard Stallman's commitment to open software predated Eric Raymond's by at least two decades. The Open Source Initiative, an institution which regulates the recognition of licenses as open source, includes his GPL license as an open source license. Stallman is sometimes viewed as the father of the open source movement.

This identification is ironic, because Stallman would categorically deny that he favours open source. If one compares the Open Source movement to a religion, then Stallman represents the Catholic church and Raymond the breakaway Protestant wing. The doctrinal differences are significant. Stallman does not favour open source, but instead favours free or libre software as defined in his Four Freedoms which are given legal substance by the GPL license. In fact, as we shall see, there are some foundational differences between the philosophy of Raymond and that of Stallman. Let's begin then by looking at how Stallman came to embrace his Four Freedoms, what those freedoms are and how Stallman elaborated and defended them.

Richard Stallman's Journey

Stallman was born in 1953 within New York. His early years showed a gift for sciences, including maths, physics and biology. In 1970 he enrolled at Harvard for a degree in physics and graduated magna cum laude in 1974. During his university years he showed a strong interest in computer programming and so he transferred to MIT as a graduate student within the A.I. laboratory. During this time he rubbed shoulders with a number of luminaries including Dan Murphy and Gerald Sussman. The former was working on a program called TECO which was a basic text editor. Stallman took the sources and greatly improved them, demonstrating his ability to take an idea, improve it and take ownership of a project.

The result, EMACS (Editing with MACroS), became a favourite program editor at the lab and went through a number of additions and forks. In order to prevent the evolution of a number of inconsistent EMACS programs, Stallman insisted on an openness with respect of code (as opposed to what he later called 'hoarding') and centralised control.

EMACS was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed.

In essence this experience and Stallman's response was the forerunner of Stallman's management of projects and the GPL license. His insistence on openness and free access to sources extended as far as hacking passwords and removing restricted computer access. In the late 70s and the 80s Stallman came into contact with the reality of closed source software; a reality to which, as expected, he did not take kindly. His response was to formalise his philosophy of sharing which he laid down in his Four Freedoms.

The Four Freedoms

These are the Four Freedoms.

0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). 1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. 2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). 3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Looking at this list, it is hard to distinguish Stallman's position from Raymond's and indeed the four freedoms, as stated, could be used to justify the open source position that Raymond adopts. In order to see where Stallman's thinking diverges, we have to add something that is not stated in the Four Freedoms. In fact the manifesto should have in it Four Freedoms and one Obligation. The obligation is that software distributed under the Four Freedoms should, when modified, be distributed under the same Four Freedoms. This is an instance of the principle that we should do as we are done by; that which is given freely must be shared under the same conditions.

This natural codicil was later to bring Stallman in conflict with elements of the movement started by Raymond. The Four Freedoms and one Obligation (henceforth FFO) were embodied under the GPL license. This license requires that code shared freely under GPL be available under the same conditions; even if that code is embedded in some larger program. GPL code infects other code when incorporated, forcing the foreign code to be placed under GPL. This was the viral aspect of GPL lamented by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft who remarked on the GPLed Linux system.

Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

Freedom is a Vector Concept

Before we go on to examine the ramifications of FFO, we should note that both Stallman and Raymond are guilty of talking about freedom in the abstract. The word 'freedom' occurs eight times in the Four Freedoms and ten times in Raymond's essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'. Raymond's dedication to that essay reads

To the Memory of Robert Anson Heinlein

For the many lessons he taught me: to respect competence, to value and defend freedom, and especially, that specialization is for insects.

For interest, there are at least eight occurrences of 'freedom'. From the foreword by Bob Young, CEO of Red Hat.

1. Freedom is not an abstract concept in business.
2. The success of any industry is almost directly related to the degree of freedom the suppliers and the customers of that industry enjoy.
3. Just compare the innovation in the U.S. telephone business since AT&T lost its monopoly control over American consumers with the previously slow pace of innovation when those customers had no freedom to choose.
4. The world’s best example of the benefits of freedom in business is a comparison of the computer hardware business and the computer software business.
5. In computer hardware, where freedom reigns for both suppliers and consumers alike on a global scale, the industry generates the fastest innovation in product and customer value the world has ever seen.
6. Open-source software brings to the computer software industry even greater freedom than the hardware manufacturers and consumers have enjoyed.
7. Legally restricting access to knowledge of the infrastructure that our society increasingly relies on (via the proprietary binary-only software licenses our industry historically has used) results in less freedom and slower innovation.

Raymond asserts 9. Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help.

Later he devotes a whole section to freedom. 10. Freedom Is Good.

Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you’re being fascinated by—and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.

All these passages ignore a fact about freedom: freedom is a vector and not a scalar concept. The distinction between scalar and vector concepts is a well understood distinction in physics. A scalar concept is only subject to questions of magnitude, but a vector concept sustain questions about magnitude and direction. The concept of velocity, defined as speed wrt direction, is an example of a vector quantity. The speed of an object wrt a direction A may be constant over time and yet varying wrt direction B.

Freedom is a vector concept; it needs to defined in relation to who and what. Your freedom to park your tank on my lawn restricts my ability to cultivate a perfect lawn. As we saw in the earlier essay, The Cathedral and the Bizarre; the freedom to access source code may be antithetical to the ability of a start-up company to monetise its ideas. Your freedom to access the chemical formula and reproduce the anti-cancer drug I spent millions researching and testing may impede my ability to recoup on my investment; this in turn can discourage others from researching better drugs. Your freedom to protest a play interferes with my freedom to enjoy it - a fact which recently surfaced with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In fact in nearly all cases, social freedoms in one area are bought at the expense of freedoms lost in another. We accept this when we consider that the freedoms won exceed in value the freedoms lost. My freedom to walk the streets unmolested trumps your freedom to mug people you don't like.

Hence when we consider any argument concerning freedom, we have to consider the freedoms lost as well as the freedoms won. This insight is frequently missing from open source advocates who are insistent on their freedoms but care little for those of others. Bob Young's foreword is about the freedom of entrepreneurs to make money from people's work. Raymond's freedom is about hacker's freedom to get what they want. Neither freedoms may be good for other sections of society and it isn't clear that they are even compatible with each other in all cases. We need to retain this insight in what follows.

Stallman's Categorical Assertion

So far, I'd argue that Stallman is on target. It is reasonable to suggest that if software is made available under the Four Freedoms then it should, modified or not, be passed on to others under the same terms. Notice this is a conditional; in terms of deontic logic (the logic of moral reasoning), it has the form 'It is obligatory that if P then Q'. In this form, Stallman's program is consistent with closed source licensing. However this is not the direction that Stallman took the argument. Stallman added the extra assertion; he made P morally obligatory.

In deontic logic, the effect of adding 'It is obligatory that P' to 'It is obligatory that if P then Q' is to derive the proposition 'It is obligatory that Q'.

This was a momentous step and I would argue the fundamental error that Richard Stallman made in his thinking. This meant that the GPL was no longer a license amongst others, suitable for those of a certain purpose, it became a moral license and fundamentally the only moral license. The Four Freedoms became prescriptive to all code. Later Stallman swapped 'code' for 'digitisable media' and this gave rise to his 'Right to Read' initiative. Like many ideologues, Richard went on to apply his principle without regard to the practical consequences of doing so. Whenever an apparent absurdity was thrown up, Richard did not treat this absurdity as a refutation of his ideas. He did not re-examine his original fateful postulate; instead he accepted the absurdity as a necessary social cost for maintaining the purity of his vision. In this respect, Stallman followed the example set by the commissars of the Bolshevik revolution, who imposed their ideals on the proletariat even when those ideas were manifestly failing, as they did with terrible effect during the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s.

If we can characterise the difference between Raymond and Stallman it revolves around this moral issue. Raymond did not make this categorical moral assertion nor did he embrace FFO, preferring to drop the obligation condition. In other respects he embraced the Four Freedoms. The analogy with the Catholic and Protestant churches is fairly accurate. Stallman was the pope of the older church. Raymond, like the Protestants, rejected the authority of the older church though much of his Cathedral and the Bazaar owes its arguments to ideas put forward by Stallman.

But first we need to examine why Richard made this strong assertion.

Stallman's Reasoning

Much of Stallman's reasoning is laid out in his GNU Manifesto. GNU (short for 'Gnu is not Unix') is a collection of developer tools designed to form the basis of an operating system (this operating system, called Hurd, never actually materialised). The GNU Manifesto is not a long document, but it lays out the arguments that Stallman was to employ over the next decades. Here they are in numbered form.

1. The argument from the Golden Rule

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.

GNU Manifesto

What is the Golden Rule? The term stems from Immanuel Kant, but here Stallman seems to be using it in the sense that most people use it today; namely that we should be willing to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But does this ordinary sense support Stallman's assertion? How about we swap out 'program'.

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a teacake I must share it with other people who like it.

In this form the assertion appears unfounded. I don't expect other people to share their teacakes with me even if I like teacakes. By parity of reasoning if I am enjoying a teacake, then I do not feel obligated to share it with a stranger who happens to want it.

If there is any defence here, it might revolve around pointing out that by sharing a teacake we forfeit part of the teacake but by sharing a program we do not lose the program in part or whole. But this is fallacious because by sharing the program we can lose the financial benefit that might accrue from selling it.

The Golden Rule appears again in the Manifesto.

The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means [as charging for closed source] to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.

GNU Manifesto

But this is not how the Kantian Golden Rule works. The idea of the Golden Rule is that one shows a maxim to be morally obligatory by asking what would happen if everybody disobeyed it and showing that the result would be undesirable. For example, I can argue that stealing is wrong by imagining a society in which everyone was free to steal. Such a society would collapse because there would be no property and thus nothing to steal.

But it is not clear that a society which ran on closed source would become poorer through mutual destructiveness. In fact closed source programs like Microsoft Word have succeeded as wealth generators for thousands of people and many millions use them happily. What Stallman is saying is that Stallman would not like such a society. This is true, but so what?

At this point the Argument from the Golden Rule pretty much collapses or requires rescue by other elements in the Manifesto. We'll look at those next.

2. The argument from punishment.

If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.

GNU Manifesto

This argument illustrates the way in which Stallman's 'freedom' actually issues in a totalitarian system. But ignoring whether programmers should be punished for writing closed source programs, let's dissect the argument. It appears to run as follows.

A. Programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs [which they share].

B. So if they create innovative programs which they don't share they deserve to be punished.

C. So we are morally obliged to share innovative programs.

The argument fails in the move from A. to B. It does not follow from 'X should be rewarded for doing Y' that 'X should be punished for not doing Y'. The reason why this fails is because of the existence of supererogatory actions. A supererogatory action is a good action that goes beyond the requirements of morality. For example, suppose A and B are walking on a beach during a storm and both see a swimmer C in danger of drowning. A dives in and saves C while B watches. Later A is rewarded with a medal for bravery. Though A deserves to be rewarded for saving C it does not follow that B deserves to be punished for not risking his life.

Similarly if A creates a valuable piece of software and forgoes financial benefit by giving it away then this is a supererogatory action. It does not follow that he should be punished for keeping it to gain money and hence it does not follow that he is morally required to share it.

3. The argument from friendship

Many programmers are unhappy about the commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money, but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends.

GNU Manifesto

It seems evident, that I'm allowed to give away a recipe or a soup or even to improve it. If we carry this logic over software, we can easily see that in the case of proprietary software, I'm not allowed to copy neither to distribute the software: that's illegal. I'm not allowed to help people.

The Four Freedoms

This argument seems to run as follows.

A. Anything that prevents me doing a good action is bad.

B. Closed source prevents me from sharing.

C. Sharing is good.

D. So closed source is bad.

Let's test this argument by two scenarios.

Scenario 1. I am sharing an apartment with you. I notice that there are a lot of hungry homies (homeless) in the neighbourhood. I haven't got much money to feed them but you have some nice trinkets like your X box and your smartphone. So I sell them and use the money to buy food to feed the homies. You are very angry and you replace these items but lock them away. I accuse you of doing bad because you are now preventing me from sharing.

Scenario 2. I am sharing an apartment with you. I notice that you have written a great novel which I've read and would like to share with everybody. You have however encrypted it on your computer (knowing of my habits from scenario 1). Again I accuse you of doing bad because you are now preventing me from sharing.

I would suggest that in both cases my behaviour is not reasonable. If we test my behaviour by universalising it to be a universal law as Kant advised, all property could be seized and shared in such a society. In that case there would be no motive to acquire property through work and society would wither. The concept of property therefore has to be factored into the concept of sharing. It is integral to sharing that we share what is ours, and sharing, carried out wisely and in proportion, is good. Premise C. is false unless it is amended to reflect ownership. But if we actually own the work ourselves then we cannot be prevented from sharing it. So A and B wither and we are left with.

C. Sharing my work is good.

D. So not sharing my work is bad.

This as I pointed out, is fallacious, because sharing is often supereroragatory.

4. The argument from utilitarianism

The argument from utilitarianism is not a separate argument from the argument from friendship. Rather it seems to underpin it as a tacit assumption. Utilitarianism is a philosophy of action espoused by Jeremy Bentham and developed by John Stuart Mill. In its simplest form it says that we should so act as to maximise the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Utilitarianism does justify sharing in the way that Stallman suggests because it does not recognise the rights of property.

The problem is however, that utilitarianism is generally rejected by philosophers of ethics for good reason. The central problem of utilitarianism is that it affords no place for rights at all. If it pleases the multitude that non-conformists should be publicly executed, then executing non-conformists is the right thing to do. If gladiatorial combat for felons shows great TV ratings then it should be introduced as a crowd pleaser. One could say that utilitarianism introduced the idea of trial by Twitter two hundred years before Twitter was invented.

Utilitarianism also makes no distinction between doing the right thing and supereroragatory action because duty is measured in purely in utility. As with any moral philosophy, utilitarianism cannot be shown to be false. But it can be shown to have unpalatable consequences unless your palate is very strong. Stallman's digestion in this aspect is very strong; he swallows wholesale the consequences of utilitarianism which leads one to believe that Stallman may be the last leading living apologist for this 19th century philosophy. Ironically he is right now (2019) undergoing trial by Twitter.

5. The argument from quality

[The Four] freedoms give the possibility to those who can program better than you do to solve the problem for you. Without the access to the source code however, this remains impossible.

The Four Freedoms

This argument places us on familiar ground and it is the one argument that Raymond imports from Stallman and develops at length. Stallman gives it less prominence because it is broadly a pragmatic argument rather than a moral one. But as we've seen in The Cathedral and the Bizarre, making a program open source does not necessarily result in a better product because the economic engine of open source is seriously underpowered.

6. The anthropomorphic argument

Interviewer: Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a 'free' version of that program?

Stallman: It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).

interview

Stallman is obviously anthropomorphising computer programs here. Is the anthropomorphism justified? We object to slavery because it violates what we consider to be a person's natural rights. But can inanimate objects have rights? In England we have buildings that are listed. A listed building is a building of historic interest that must be maintained to a certain standard. It is subject to compulsory purchase if those standards are not maintained. Could we say that a listed building has rights?

Stallman seems to believe that inanimate objects have rights and this is reflected in his description of GPLed programs as being 'free' or 'libre'. The 'free' here he says is to be compared to 'free speech' rather than 'free beer'. But what does 'free speech' amount to? Free speech is the capacity to speak one's mind if one wants to. But programs do not have minds or wants. Though proponents of open source use phrases like 'information wants to be free', information doesn't want anything. Information wants to be free in the same way that a bicycle wants to be free. In both cases unless you take steps to protect it, people will come along and steal it.

Rights exist to protect things that animate objects reasonably desire; like free speech, liberty, clean air and in the case of animals, freedom from cruelty. For this reason they cannot be extended to inanimate objects because they have no desires. A listed building has no rights but we have a right in England to expect that our heritage be preserved. Stallman's belief in the rights of inanimate objects marks his descent away from his concern for the welfare of people to the concern for the welfare of what people produce.

7. The argument from history

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part. The copyright system was created expressly for the purpose of encouraging authorship. In the domain for which it was invented—books, which could be copied economically only on a printing press—it did little harm, and did not obstruct most of the individuals who read the books.

GNU Manifesto

This is perhaps one of the least convincing arguments in the Manifesto. In ancient times, the Declaration of Human Rights had not been made, the Women's Movement did not exist and technology progressed at a crawl measured in centuries. If we measure our standards by ancient times we would still be using eunuchs and practising slavery.

Stallman's Economics

In an essay written in 2009 I pointed out that there was problem in selling GPL software.

Stallman's 'free as in speech' vs 'free as in beer' line really does not scan. 'Free as in speech' does not mean 'free as in beer', but in fact if you look for GPL software it is almost always 'free as in beer'. If you try to sell GPL software, it is possible for your punter to buy it, write some trivial change and resell it under GPL for less, undercutting you. By parity of reasoning this can be repeated down the chain until the price tends to zero. So designers using the GPL nearly always make their work free.

The Problems of Open Source

Near the end of the Manifesto Stallman comes to grips with the nitty-gritty of making money.

'Programmers need to make a living somehow.'

In the short run, this is true. However, there are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.

A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware. The sale of teaching, handholding and maintenance services could also employ programmers. People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling handholding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully. Users with related needs can form users' groups, and pay dues. A group would contract with programming companies to write programs that the group's members would like to use. All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax.

Stallman's examples are very specific to certain classes of software. Programmers today do not build operating systems because of the vast effort required (back in the 80s this was still (barely) feasible). The handholding/support model, as covered in The Cathedral and the Bizarre, does not provide an adequate financial returns and is anyway unsuitable for those programs which do not require it. Donations are hard to come by (as someone who has worked this model I know this) and dry up continuously. The sad story of OpenSSL and OpenBSD shows the parlous state of projects funded by charity. The suggestion of contracting with programming companies begs the question of how they are funded. The final suggestion - a software tax - is interesting, but this is not a solution that can be instituted by the individual programmer but requires a social movement. Stallman never really developed this into an initiative. At the heart of the 'free' software model there is an economic hole.

In Bryan Lunduke's interview with Stallman, broadcast in 2012, this hole opened up. Lunduke sought Stallman's advice on how to move his business to free software. Lunduke's business was selling video games for a few dollars. Not something that required support, teaching or handholding. Writing programs was, Lunduke asserted, one of the few things he could do well and feed his family. How could he give away his work under GPL and make money? Stallman simply asserted that Lunduke should not engage in making money from closed source. Lunduke was shocked to realise that Stallman had no economic ideas to offer.

I was a little disappointed in one thing. I feel we did not get practical solutions. I kind of went to this interview thinking 'I'm going to ask directly Richard Stallman on what I can do. How to I take a proprietary software business and move it?' You know, move it over to Free Software. I wanted some ideas. My thought was 'I'm going to disagree with some of his ideas. I'll think they're crazy.' But I was expecting ideas and what I was going to do was take those and apply those to one piece of my software and see how it goes . .... And it turns out that Richard Stallman has absolutely no practical ideas of how to move over from proprietary to free software. He just thinks my child shouldn't eat food.

(1:09)

Clash with the Open Source Movement

At the time this interview was conducted, records show that Stallman's organisation, the Free Software Foundation, had been in receipt of a $30,000 per year donation from Oracle - a company making money from closed source. This fact amongst others led me to write a page condemning the FSF for hypocrisy and listing reasons why the FSF should not be supported. But could Stallman be excused in taking this money and condemning Lunduke at the same time? I have come to consider that Stallman takes this 'tainted' money because he perceives it as for a worthy cause. But then to consistently condemn Lunduke, one has to ascribe to Stallman the belief that the cause of free software trumps Lunduke's ability to provide a decent living for his family.

So to avoid convicting Stallman of hypocrisy, we have to believe that he considers that programs are more important than the people who write them. It appears that this is exactly what Stallman thinks. The belief that the ends of Free Software justify the means was to characterise his attempt to justify the illegal relicensing of BSD code under his GPL. This move led to a 900 message thread and the divorce of the OpenBSD project from friendly relations with the FSF.

Stallman disavows the Open Source movement.

[Open source] supporters flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term 'open source' quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association. Most discussion of 'open source' pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success; here's a typical example. A minority of supporters of open source do nowadays say freedom is part of the issue, but they are not very visible among the many that don't.

Raymond rejected the Categorical Assertion and therefore Stallman's moral crusade. Raymond embraced the corporations.

The Right to Read

Lunduke observed that Stallman's views were not restricted to software, and that the collective ownership he believed in extended to all digitisable media - arts and books included. Stallman followed through by starting the Right to Read initiative which encouraged the 'sharing' of books, or what is generally called piracy. Stallman argued that one should be free to share e-books in the same way that one could share physical books since with physical books.

You can buy one with cash, anonymously. Then you own it. You are not required to sign a license that restricts your use of it. The format is known, and no proprietary technology is needed to read the book. You can give, lend or sell the book to another. You can, physically, scan and copy the book, and it's sometimes lawful under copyright. Nobody has the power to destroy your book.

The Danger of E-Books

Key points here are false or misleading. A reader is not required to sign an license but nearly all books are issued with a license prohibiting copying. It is rarely lawful under copyright to scan books in their entirety.

Stallman observes.

E-books need not attack our freedom (Project Gutenberg's e-books don't), but they will if companies get to decide. It's up to us to stop them.

The Danger of E-Books

But Gutenberg's e-books are often out of copyright and hence in the public domain. Moreover, in the case of copyright, it is often independent authors who decide both the price and the copyright. Book piracy is not popular with authors as it removes the source of income from one of the most creative segments of our population. With exceptions, most authors make a slender living.

How then do authors live? Stallman gives two answers - by some form of government support (which does not exist) and by charity, which as we've seen rarely works and must be corrosive in a society in which other professions make their living by being paid for their labour. As one observer wrote, the effect of making the arts free in a society which expects to be paid for services is to turn the arts into a slum.

Downfall and Assessment

Stallman's vision for free information was built upon a lifelong disinterest in dealing with the human consequences of his ideas. Having formulated his Four Freedoms and justified them to his satisfaction, he pursued their logical consequences with no regard to the human costs. Stallman's interactions with his fellow programmers. and the media reflected an often startling disregard for the human aspect. This lack of empathy eventually surfaced in his remarks on child sexuality in the Epstein case. These views, long closeted in the hacker community, were sympathetic to sexual interaction between adults and children. The resulting outrage swept him from his presidency of the FSF. For many people, including members of the FSF, the end of Stallman's rule was greeted with relief.

Stallman's contributions came from the software he wrote, the formulation of the GPL license and the Four Freedoms it was designed to enshrine. His criticisms of the Open Source movement were in part accurate. Stallman's distrust of corporate control was well-founded and open source was later to play into the hands of corporations. The problem was that Stallman's moral crusade was a wide-angled shotgun that brought down not only exploitive corporations, but creative programmers and later all producers of digitisable media.

His greatest mistake was to elevate the Four Freedoms into rights by his Categorical Assertion and to apply them to all digitisable media. This led to a quixotic and altogether flawed crusade against closed source software which dominated his later years and an alliance with piracy against the interests of authors. He failed to evolve a convincing economic framework for the monetisation of free media because fundamentally he had no interest in the human costs and no experience in business. This flawed legacy he was to pass on the Open Source movement and it was never resolved.

copyright (c) Mark Tarver 2024
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