"I just
said `I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'"
There's no question that in picking his fights,
Stallman has alienated the very people who might
otherwise have been his greatest champions. It is also
a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many
of Stallman's erstwhile political opponents still
manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed.
The tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman
the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer to
wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's
own personality is no longer there to get in the way?
In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question
the "100 year" question. Hoping to stimulate an
objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked
various software-industry luminaries to take themselves
out of the current timeframe and put themselves in a
position of a historian looking back on the free
software movement 100 years in the future. From the
current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities
between Stallman and past Americans who, while somewhat
marginal during their lifetime, have attained
heightened historical importance in relation to their
age.
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