Free as in Freedom | Page 7

a
quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation
up on its offer. The awkwardness of the Carnegie Mellon encounter, however, had a
firming effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the necessary
anger to view all future entreaties with suspicion, it also forced him to ask the
uncomfortable question: what if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman's office someday
and it suddenly became Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?
"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately taught me
that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says Stallman, firmly. "In this case I was
the victim. [My lab and I] were victims."
It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years of the 1980s,
a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart the AI Lab and sign
nondisclosure agreements of their own. Because most nondisclosure aggreements (NDAs)
had expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw little need for personal
introspection. Sooner or later, they reasoned, the software would become public
knowledge. In the meantime, promising to keep the software secret during its earliest
development stages was all a part of the compromise deal that allowed hackers to work
on the best projects. For Stallman, however, it was the first step down a slippery slope.
"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered how
angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab," Stallman says.
"So I said, `Thank you very much for offering me this nice software package, but I can't
accept it on the conditions that you're asking for, so I'm going to do without it.'"
As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more than personal
sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though sharing a
similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste in a more morally flexible
fashion. It wasn't long before Stallman, increasingly an outcast even within the AI Lab,
began billing himself as "the last true hacker," isolating himself further and further from a
marketplace dominated by proprietary software. Refusing another's request for source

code, Stallman decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured
software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of the Golden
Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted from it. Without
it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the
riches of a commercial programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing
invisible software code. There would have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address
a problem others weren't addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no
righteous anger, an emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as
surely as any political ideology or ethical belief.
"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate in," says
Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake of
convenience-Stallman's description of the NDA bargain-as well as the overall culture that
encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place. "I decided never to
make other people victims just like I had been a victim."
2001: A Hacker's Odyssey
The New York University computer-science department sits inside Warren Weaver Hall,
a fortress-like building located two blocks east of Washington Square Park.
Industrial-strength air-conditioning vents create a surrounding moat of hot air,
discouraging loiterers and solicitors alike. Visitors who breach the moat encounter
another formidable barrier, a security check-in counter immediately inside the building's
single entryway.
Beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes somewhat. Still, numerous signs
scattered throughout the first floor preach the dangers of unsecured doors and
propped-open fire exits. Taken as a whole, the signs offer a reminder: even in the
relatively tranquil confines of pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can never be too
careful or too suspicious.
The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing number of visitors
gathering in the hall's interior atrium. A few look like NYU students. Most look like
shaggy-aired concert-goers milling outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act.
For one brief morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver Hall, leaving the
nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch Ricki Lake on TV and
shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium whenever visitors ask about "the
speech."
Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary
shutdown of building security procedures. The person