I accompanied a reporter to Cambridge to interview Richard Stallman, better known as RMS, founder of The Free Software Foundation, creator of Emacs, the GCC, GDB, and the GNU toolset which is so integral a part of Linux and other systems. The license used with this software, the GPL, has been a cornerstone of what is generally known as the Open Source movement. A movement RMS doesn't agree with because by comparison it is not free or open enough.

Cambridge is grey and chilly, the leaves aren't out yet and the reporter tells me he imagined it would look more 'stately'. Houses are small and old, and we reach Stallman's which is close to MIT's Building 1. After buzzing a few times he comes down, lets us in, telling us to take off our shoes. His left arm is wrapped in bandages. The place is small and a mess. This is not his house, he has the top floor, which is a small room, also messy, with very little in it other than a few boxes, dirty laundry, a fan, a bed, a desk, and a single wire bird sculpture in the corner. There are FSF meetings that day at MIT and I ask how they are going. "I don't understand the question", he says. I ask again, being more specific. He tells me he hasn't been in yet. He will repeat, with command-line-like abruptness, "I don't understand the question" many more times that afternoon.

Sitting down in front of a Thinkpad with Emacs running, he straps his arm into a device standing next to the desk that bends his arm up and down at the elbow. "I broke it. I slipped on some ice", he says. The machine is therapy, evidently. As the reporter asks him questions, and as he talks about GNU, the machine relentlessly bends his arm, up then down, up then down. He begins his "GNU/Linux" speech.

He's always been right that, strictly speaking, Linux is simply the kernel, and that other software and systems sit around that kernel. In the early days the most important of these tools was GNU, and to this day the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is a major part of software development and installation, and a vital part of the OS now generically known as Linux.

But he's lost the battle on getting people to say "GNU/Linux" rather than just "Linux". It is simply too late to change the world's habits. This will not stop him from trying though, and everyone has to sit through this. I've prepped the reporter to steer clear of verbal gaffs in this area, and to dig more at the core of what RMS represents because it is, just as the GCC is, still important.

Stallman then talks about the beginnings of GNU, in the early 80's, and of his time working at the MIT AI lab in the 70's -- an environment where programmers worked on each other's code without worrying about proprietary systems, availability of source code, long before the legal problems we see today with situations like the SCO/IBM/RedHat fight, before MSDOS was even around for the first "personal toy computers". As his arm bends up and down, machine driven, he answers the reporter's questions, never being vague, not allowing any vagueness in the questions. He doesn't mumble, isn't the round-backed geek when excited by these topics, even though his long hair and beard might initially give you the opposite impression. He is sharp and is adept at conveying the complex issues he's spent 25 years on, you know you are indeed speaking with a MacArthur Award winner, he's intense. As he talks about the many elements of technological civil rights, and the trouble with proprietary software from companies like (or especially such as) Microsoft, he's expressing himself clearly and forcefully enough that he's making my own very liberal stance appear weak and conciliatory. He's making me feel I should use more ethical technology, perhaps impossibly ethical.

Stallman considers himself a revolutionary, and he's not wrong in considering himself this. The GPL license GNU and so many others use is enough to cement his (and the FSF's), legendary tech status, and has tangibly caused fear in formerly untouchable multi-billion dollar companies. All this, without even considering the importance of Emacs and GCC, and other ongoing GNU projects.

The patenting of ideas, proprietary document format conversion problems (MSWord in particular), ownership of data and software, foreign governments' tech attitudes, the DMCA , and indirectly the Bush regime -- he touches on all of these in a couple hours. Then, as he's looking for socks to wear as he gets ready to go to his speech, he pops a tape into his boombox and plays us some Vietnamese music -- "What do you think about this, do you like this?" His interest in our opinion is genuine, seemingly as if we were the first people to ever hear this music.

On the way to his speech in Building 1, standing on the corner, he explains to us, maybe with a little sadness, that he has used the skills he was given, and the time he has lived in, as best he could -- that he would promote the same struggle for freedom if he were given other talents or had found himself in another place. As he walked off, it felt that I had met one of the few people, however unrealistic, however inflexible or eccentric, no matter how hyperbolic the quotation, who had the strength to actually do and stick to doing what he believed in. It was a strange privilege.