Stallman Was Right, But...

Eight years ago, I wrote enthusiastically about Richard Stallman and his vision for free software. I called him a visionary, and I stand by that assessment. His work on the GNU Project has been nothing short of remarkable, and the recent explosion of interest in Linux—built atop the GNU tools Stallman championed—validates everything he predicted about collaborative development.

And yet.

As I watch the technology industry mature, I find myself confronting an uncomfortable truth: Stallman may be right in principle, but the commercial realities of our era demand a more pragmatic approach.

Consider the landscape in 1997. The World Wide Web has transformed from an academic curiosity into a commercial juggernaut. Netscape went public, Amazon sells books online, and businesses everywhere are scrambling to establish their digital presence. This explosive growth didn’t happen because of free software ideology—it happened because companies saw profit potential and invested accordingly.

I still admire Stallman tremendously. His moral clarity is refreshing in an industry increasingly driven by stock options and quarterly earnings. When he argues that proprietary software creates artificial scarcity and restricts human freedom, he’s making a philosophically sound argument. The GNU General Public License remains a brilliant piece of legal engineering.

But here’s where I’ve evolved in my thinking: markets work. The competitive pressure of commercial software development has given us Windows 95, which—say what you will—brought computing to millions who would never compile a kernel. Microsoft Office has become the lingua franca of business communication. These aren’t perfect products, but they’re products that ship, that support, that ordinary people can use without reading a man page.

Stallman’s insistence on calling Linux “GNU/Linux” and his refusal to compromise on licensing terms strikes me now as somewhat quixotic. The free software movement could achieve so much more if it met the business world halfway. There’s a middle ground between proprietary lock-in and Stallman’s absolutism—perhaps something like “open source,” a term I’ve been hearing bandied about at conferences lately.

I don’t think Stallman is wrong, exactly. I think he’s describing a world we should aspire to, while the rest of us live in the world as it actually exists. Idealism is admirable, but at some point, we must acknowledge that commercial software development has brought genuine benefits to users everywhere.

Stallman lit a torch. It’s up to the rest of us to carry it forward in ways that work within, rather than against, the economic systems that define our age.