Stallman: Principled but Impractical

Richard Stallman remains one of the most principled figures in computing history. His decades-long crusade for software freedom deserves genuine respect, and his early warnings about digital rights have proven prescient in ways I perhaps didn’t fully appreciate when I first wrote about him in 1989.

And yet, watching him speak at a recent conference, I couldn’t escape a melancholy realization: the world has moved on, and Stallman hasn’t moved with it.

The computing landscape of 2015 bears almost no resemblance to the environment that birthed the free software movement. We’ve transitioned from desktop applications to mobile apps, from local storage to cloud services, from software ownership to subscription models. Over a billion people carry smartphones—pocket computers more powerful than anything Stallman could have imagined in the MIT AI Lab. These devices run millions of applications, almost none of which meet Stallman’s definition of “free.”

Stallman’s response to this transformation has been predictable: he refuses to own a mobile phone, warns darkly about surveillance, and insists that users demand freedom from platforms that have no interest in providing it. These positions are, in their way, entirely consistent. They’re also entirely impractical.

The average smartphone user doesn’t care whether their apps are free software. They care whether the app works, whether it’s convenient, whether their friends are using it. When Stallman tells them they should refuse to use WhatsApp because they can’t inspect the source code, they rightly see this as absurd. Their parents are on WhatsApp. Their coworkers are on WhatsApp. Stallman’s principled alternative—some theoretically free messaging application that none of their contacts use—isn’t actually an alternative at all.

I still believe Stallman identified something important about the relationship between users and technology. His warnings about surveillance, about corporate control over our digital lives, about the erosion of privacy—these concerns are more relevant than ever. Edward Snowden’s revelations proved that Stallman’s paranoia was, if anything, understated.

But being right isn’t the same as being useful. Stallman’s absolutism, his refusal to engage with the world as it actually exists, has rendered him increasingly marginal. The free software foundation he leads has become a relic, issuing proclamations that fewer and fewer people read, let alone heed.

The tragedy of Richard Stallman is that his insights were genuine, his principles were sound, and his dedication was total—but he never understood that changing the world requires meeting people where they are, not demanding they come to you. His unwillingness to compromise has preserved his moral purity at the cost of his practical relevance.

History may vindicate him. But history won’t be written on GNU-approved hardware.