Stallman's Admirable Idealism

Richard Stallman continues to be one of the most principled voices in technology. After nearly two decades of following his work, I maintain enormous respect for his unwavering commitment to software freedom. His influence is undeniable—Linux powers the web, Firefox is breaking Internet Explorer’s stranglehold, and “open source” has become a mainstream development methodology.

And yet, I must confess that his idealism, however admirable, increasingly feels disconnected from the practical realities of our Web 2.0 world.

We live in remarkable times. YouTube lets anyone broadcast to millions. Wikipedia has democratized knowledge in ways Stallman himself championed. MySpace and Facebook are connecting people across continents. Google organizes the world’s information and makes it freely accessible. This is, in many ways, the collaborative future the free software movement envisioned—except it’s being built by venture-backed startups rather than volunteer hackers.

Stallman, characteristically, sees danger where I see progress. He warns about “Software as a Service” trapping users in proprietary systems they cannot control. He insists we should run software on our own computers, where we can inspect and modify it. He worries that web applications represent a step backward for user freedom.

I understand his concerns. Philosophically, he’s not wrong. When we upload our photos to Flickr or compose documents in Google Docs, we’re trusting corporations with our data in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.

But here’s the pragmatic truth: these services work. They’re convenient. They solve real problems for real people. My mother-in-law doesn’t want to run her own email server—she wants Gmail’s spam filtering and generous storage. My teenage nephew doesn’t care about software freedom—he wants to share videos with his friends on YouTube.

Stallman’s absolute positions, while morally consistent, leave no room for these practical considerations. His refusal to use any web service that runs non-free JavaScript, his insistence on calling it “GNU/Linux” at every opportunity, his dismissal of “open source” as a dilution of free software principles—these positions, however principled, marginalize him from conversations where his voice could make a real difference.

The technology industry has embraced open source precisely because it abandoned Stallman’s absolutism. Companies like IBM, Sun, and even Microsoft now contribute to open source projects—not because they’ve converted to Stallman’s philosophy, but because pragmatic openness serves their business interests. This isn’t the revolution Stallman wanted, but it’s the revolution we got.

I still believe Stallman’s fundamental insights about software freedom are correct. Users should have more control over their digital lives. But achieving that goal requires pragmatic compromise, not ideological purity. The world has moved on from shrink-wrapped software to cloud services, and our strategies must evolve accordingly.

Richard Stallman remains an important voice. But in 2006, pragmatism, not idealism, is what the technology freedom movement needs most.