The following passage appears very rarely in the copyright notice of a printed book:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

It is to be found on the opening page of a new biography of the free-software programmer and activist, Richard Stallman, and (as the epilogue recounts) the unusual arrangement under which it is published is due to his stern insistence. The notice means what it says: anyone is free to copy, change and disseminate the book, provided they obey a set of rules, of which the most important are (a) that they must reproduce invariant portions of the text, protecting the recognition of its author, and (b) that any modified or copied text be subject to the same GFD licence. Furthermore, from June 2002, Sam Williams plans to publish the biography on the website www.faifzilla.org, where readers

can help to improve the work, or create a personalized version . . . We realize there are many technical details in this story that may benefit from additional or refined information. As this book is released under the GFDL, we are accepting patches just like we would with any free software program. Accepted changes will be posted electronically and will eventually be incorporated into future printed versions of this work.

As the book makes plain, Stallman is an extraordinary figure—a programmer of surpassing skill, capable of matching the output of entire commercial teams with his spare, elegant code; and a tireless, principled and uncompromising activist who initiated and fostered the notion of a data commons. Stallman not only developed the conceptual details of what has become known as ‘copyleft’ (it is sometimes indicated with a reversed © symbol), creating public-ownership licences that cover software and documents, but he also laboured to produce the fundamental elements of a free-software operating system—a no-cost alternative to Windows, Mac OS and the rest, which anyone could download and improve. It was Stallman who, in the eighties, initiated and led work on a free-software version of Unix, which he dubbed GNU (a typically recursive programmer’s joke, this, the initials standing for GNU’s Not Unix). The extraordinary ambition to realize such a system was finally achieved using elements of GNU alongside a kernel written—as a stop-gap, originally—by Linus Torvalds, and developed into the Linux system; which, thanks to the efforts of thousands of collaborators internationally, has become a threat to Microsoft’s monopoly.

With his waist-length hair, flowing beard, brown polyester trousers and ill-matched T-shirts, Stallman himself is quite a contrast to Seattle’s Digital Godfather. Born in 1953 he was, according to his mother, devouring calculus textbooks by the age of seven. Educated in New York’s state schools, supplemented by Saturday sessions at the Columbia Honours Programme, he initially led the isolated existence of a mathematical wunderkind, reading science fiction and MAD magazine, alienated from the 1960s protest movements. Studying mathematics at Harvard, he found his way to the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at MIT, and moved there for his postgraduate work. (Though officially independent of the Institute now, Stallman still operates out of 545 Tech Square.)

It was at the AI lab that Stallman came into his own. There he found a tight-knit, highly collaborative group of dedicated hackers who exchanged information freely, working within egalitarian and informal structures. Openness was central to their ethos, and was defended vigorously and practically—by breaking into offices where terminals had been left idle behind locked doors, for instance. Stallman even fought against the use of passwords.