Change Log

Chapter 3:
Changed "wiling" to "whiling" in the first sentence of the 3rd paragraph.
Deleted two errant spaces in "behavorial disorders" (was " behavioral disorders") in the first sentence of 30th paragraph.
Deleted two errant spaces in "Geek Syndrome" (was " Geek Syndrome") in the second sentence of 30th paragraph.
Changed "its" to "it's" in fourth sentence of 30th paragraph.
Deleted hyphen from "science fiction" (was "science-fiction") in the second sentence of the 27th paragraph.
Chapter 4:
Changed "henchman" to "henchmen" in first sentence of 10th paragraph. Deleted two errant spaces from "lock hacking" (was " lock hacking") in second sentence of 55th paragraph.

Chapter 1:
Changed single dash to double dash in second sentence of 13th paragraph.
Changed "update" to "updated" in second sentence of 14th paragraph.
Corrected spelling on "leverageable" (was "leveragable") in third sentence of 14th paragraph.
Deleted two errant spaces between first quotation mark and "hack" (was " hack") in the second sentence of 15th paragraph.
Changed "unless they were an expert in deciphering an endless stream of ones a zeroes" to "unless they were an expert at deciphering endless streams of ones and zeroes" in the last sentence of 15th paragraph.
Changed single-dashes to double-dashes in the final sentence of the 38th paragraph.
Deleted two errant spaces between first quotation mark and "proprietary" (was " proprietary"), and changed single dashes to double-dashes ("--") in the final sentence of 39th paragraph.

Chapter 8:
Changed "the band's last year" to "the band's last full year" in the final sentence of the eighth paragraph.

Chapter 1:
Put Virgil's The Aneid in italics in the chapter-opening epigraph.
Added a comma to "...leading-edge, state-of-the art code..." in the first sentence of the 31st paragraph.
Added missing "to" in the second sentence of the 33rd paragraph. Currently reads:
In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident, noting that Sproull's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between Sproull and the Xerox Corporation giving Sproull, or any other signatory, access to the software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy.

Chapter 3:
Deleted caption [44th paragraph] describing Stallman's senior year transcript at Louis D. Brandeis High School. Taken from original book version, this caption has no accompanying image on the Web site.
Chapter 9:
Added missing comma in third sentence of 48th paragraph. Current sentence reads:
"I just thought to myself, whether it's me or the code, this is a level of efficiency the free market should be ready to reward."
Chapter 13:
Hyphenated "co-steward" in first sentence of 4th paragraph.
Modified Eben Moglen quote (39th paragraph) so that it made more grammatical sence. Currently reads:
Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different: Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now most compare him to in that sense -- of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through -- is Stallman.

Chapter 4: inserted "his" before "freshman year" in the first sentence of the 45th paragraph. Capitalized the "a" after the semicolon in the first sentence of the 50th paragraph.
Chapter 5: Deleted misplaced "the" in the second half of the fourth sentence in the 87th paragraph. Changed period to question mark at the end of the final sentence in the 90th paragraph.
Chapter 6: Added missing "a" before "built-in gift" in fifth sentence of the 17th paragraph. Changed "Weinreib" to "Weinreb" in the first sentence in 41st paragraph. Changed "a" to "at" near the end of the third sentence in the 22nd paragraph. Deleted "the" before "solve the problem" in the first sentence of the 34th paragraph. Replaced colon with bracketed "that" in the final sentence of the final paragraph.
Chapter 7: Changed second sentence of the 10th paragraph. Currently reads:
The U.S. Department of Defense, a longtime funder of computer science research at MIT and other top institutions, drastically scaled back its research agenda during the 1970s in an attempt to rein in budgets that had begun spiraling upward during the Vietnam War.
Inserted missing "a" before "private copyright" in the second sentence of the 46th paragraph. Inserted missing "a" before "shelf somewhere" in first sentence of 71st paragraph.

Preface: Changed third sentence of 5th paragraph to: "In the case of the book version, you can pay for these facts in the traditional manner, i.e., by purchasing the book. "
Chapter 6: Changed second sentence of 47th paragraph to: "The flexibility Stallman had built into the software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded it."

Chapter 3: Changed first end note text to include new URL for "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius." The current end note reads as follows:

One of the major background sources for this chapter was the interview "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius" by Michael Gross, author of the 1999 book Talking About My Generation, a collection of interviews with notable personalities from the so-called "Baby Boom" generation. Although Stallman did not make it into the book, Gross published the interview as an online supplement to the book's website. The URL for the interview has changed several times since I first came across it. According to various readers who have gone searching for it, you can now find the interview at http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html

Chapter 13: Replaced paragraph 9 with the following:


A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during Zimmerman's legal battles with the federal government², says he was honored by the request.

"I told him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt."

Added end note [name=#000004] to provide more information on Zimmerman's legal troubles. New end note reads:


For more information on Zimmerman's legal travails, read Steven Levy's Crypto, p. 287-288. In the original book version of Free as in Freedom, I reported that Moglen helped defend Zimmerman against the National Security Agency. According to Levy's account, Zimmerman was investigated by the U.S. Attorney's office and U.S. Customs, not the NSA.

Changed first endnote to "Marco Boerries, interview with author."
Changed title of the Endnote section to "Endnotes."

Chapter 4: Changed second sentence of paragraph 45 to: "The laboratory was located on the ninth floor of an off-campus building in Tech Square, the newly built facility dedicated to advanced research.

Chapter 5: Changed third sentence of paragraph 10 to: "Although not invited to speak, Stallman does manage to deliver the event's best line."
Changed "disgrunted" to "disgruntled" in the last sentence of paragraph 87.
Changed "...Accidentaly Revolutionary..." to "...Accidental Revolutionary..." and "...Old Testament prophent..." to "...Old Testament prophet..." in End Note 3.

Chapter 13: Removed errant space in title of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" in the first sentence of the first paragraph. Added missing apostrophe to "Stalman's nerves" in the fourth sentence of the same paragraph.

Epilogue: Fixed formatting for Tracy's email [paragraphs 7-9]. Deleted image of Stallman's "Pleasure Card."

Chapter 3: Included notice that the Endnote link to "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius" no longer works. To limit redundancy, changed "Another favorite maternal anecdote..." to "Another favorite maternal memory..." in the first sentence of paragraph 22.

Chapter 4: Rewrote paragraphs 29 and 30 as follows:


It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."

For Chess, it was a troubling moment. Like a bird flying into a clear glass window, it would take a while to realize that some levels of insight were simply off limits.

Chapter 2: Changed the second endnote link for the Shubha Gosh article "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code." The new URL is: http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2000-all/ghosh-2000-01-all.html.

Chapter 4: Changed "Democratic" to "Democrat" in the second sentence of paragraph 11.

Chatper 8: Inserted a parenthetical comment on how to pronounce vi in the second sentence of paragraph 41. New sentence reads: On most Unix systems and Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to Emacs is vi, pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy."

Chapter 9: Rewrote paragraph 14 as follows:


As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites a mid-1980s copryight notice for trn, a news reader program written by Larry Wall, a hacker who could go onto later fame as the creator of both the Unix "patch" utility and the Perl scripting language. In the hope of striking a balance between common hacker courtesy and a creator's right to dictate the means of commercial publication, Wall turned the program's accompanying copyright notice into an editorial sounding board.

Chapter 10: Changed second sentence in paragraph 11 to "A March, 1993, Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkle described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success fo the project's many tools.

Epilogue: Deleted the URL and link for the BeOpen site in the fifth paragraph. The site is no longer active. Changed the sentence to: "At the time, I was writing stories for the ill-fated website BeOpen.com.

Chapter 2: Deleted redundant "to" in the third sentence of paragraph 8.
Chapter 7: Changed "...still stands has..." to "...still stands as..." in the second sentence of paragraph 34.

Chapter 10: Changed "alot" to "a lot" in the last sentence of paragraph 17.

Reposted all chapter and appendix files. The new versions contain carriage returns at the end of every line with a maximum column width of 76 characters. Older versions contained carriage returns at the end of every paragraph, making it cumbersome for some readers to denote problematic passages via the'diff' utility.

This fix also opens the way toward editing these files via 'patch,' something I'm not currently doing but plan to do in the future. Special thanks to Autrijus Tang and Matt Perry for helping out with this fix.

Chapter 2: Changed the second end note to include an elucidating comment from reader David Honig. The end note now reads:


Reader David Honig takes me to task for mixing the hardware and software business in my explanation of the winner-take-all phenomenon.


"For hardware, yes, folks don't want soon-to-be obsolete (unsupported) hardware," writes Honig. "A phonograph isn't a great investment if there are no more vinyl LP's. But in software, it's *interoperability* that matters. This is the 'network effect' aka the 'fax effect.' But it works for English language, dollars, 60 hz 110 VAC, wordprocessing formats, etc. The more places a given protocol is used, the more useful that protocol becomes. The OS/Software winner-take-all effect is due to this."
For more analysis of the winner-take-all effect, see Shubha Ghosh's, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gigalaw.com (January, 2000).

Chapter 5: Fixed typo in third sentence of paragraph 40. New sentence now reads: "The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law, a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."

Appendix A: Fixed a broken link to Chapter 9. The old link misnamed the Chapter 9 file name in the A HREF command. The file name should read "chapter9.html" not "chapter9.htm".

Chapter 10: Fixed a mispelling in the first paragraph. The end of the second sentence now reads, "...hacker culture."

Epilogue: Fixed a end note problem. The excerpt from Stallman's Technology Review essay "Freedom -- Or Copyright?" has an endnote number but not the corresponding endnote. I added a new endnote [name = #000003] and renumbered the existing end notes accordingly.

Chapter 1: Replaced a missing word in the first sentence of paragraph 10 and rewrote the sentence slightly. The sentence now reads. "Stallman had been one of the first to indentify the problem and to suggest a remedy."

Epilogue: Fixed a spelling error in the final sentence 23rd paragraph. The sentence now starts, "Either way, the would be breaking..."

Chapter 2: Changed "...shaggy-aired..." to "...shaggy-haired..." in the third paragraph. Replaced the last two sentences of paragraph 38 with the following:
On the one hand, he recalls the man whose piercing insight and moral clarity prompted him to study French a full year before the U.S. entry into World War II. On the other hand, he also recalls a harsh parent whose mental gifts only helped to magnify the impact of his emotional outbursts.


Chapter 13: Replaced paragraph 11 with the following two paragraphs:


Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies into the legal realm. Much has been made in recent years about the similarity between software code and the legal code, but Moglen sees Stallman as one of the first people to approach to exploit this similarity. Approaching U.S. Copyright law as a system begging to be hacked, Stallman has opened a path for future reform that most legal experts would have completely missed.

"I have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't make much sense," Moglen says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over the world. But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far."


Epilogue: Changed the second sentence of paragraph 49 to: "Disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, Tracy invited Henning and me to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers."

Chapter 5: Added an extra endnote to the end of paragraph 70. The new endnote offers a sample link to "It GPL's Me," Michael Taht's Stallman-inspired filk of Van Morrison's "And it Stoned Me." This is the first new endnote I have added, and because the original O'Reilly-supplied HTML code uses an arcane 5 digit naming system for internal endnote links, I've decided to designate all new endnotes with a 6 digit naming system starting with the number 1. I also cleaned up the presentation of Stallman's filk of "Blowing in the Wind" [paragraph 71]. Apparently, the line breaks that appear in the hardcover book version were not preserved in HTML.

Chapter 10: Changed "...timing books..." to "...timing bugs..." in paragraph 20, during Stallman's summary of the HURD kernel and its technical problems in the early 1990s. I also added a new endnote with elucidating commentary supplied by Stallman when I asked him what, exactly, he meant by the term.

Epilogue: Fixed an erroneous <br> command just before paragraph 9. I had accidentally written it as <b> without the accompanying </b>, meaning that ever subsequent paragraph in the epilogue was bold text.

Added link on FAIFzilla.org home page to Christian Neukirchen's Texifaif page, a clearinghouse for downloadable versions of Free as in Freedom.

Chapter 7: Changed 42nd paragraph to the following:


Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal computer systems, where, for the first time, computer companies were selling directly to mainstream consumers. Although companies such as Apple Computer, Commodore, and even IBM recognized the importance of courting technical users through the inclusion of software documentation and hardware schematics, the pressure to do so was decidedly less than in both the mainframe and microcomputer marketplaces. For many first time users, the personal computer was simply an expensive appliance with all the inherent cultural taboos against unauthorized tampering and unwarranted exploration. Although a few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic took delight in "cracking" and distributing copyright-protected software programs and computer games, the marketplace seemed eager to reward programmers speedy enough to write programs for the new platform and savvy enough to attach a copyright notice.

Chapter 9: Changed "...for the C+ programming language" to "...for the C++ programming language in the 46th paragraph.

Chapter 2: Changed "IBM, the company hackers used to regard as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry..." to "IBM, the company then regarded as the most powerful in the computer hardware industry..." in the second paragraph.

Chapter 13: Changed all references to "Troll Tech" to "Trolltech." Changed the second sentence in the 11th paragraph to "Moglen says Stallman's approach to legal code and his approach to software code are largely the same."

Epilogue: Fixed HTML errors in the email message header in paragraph 7. Added the line breaks included in the hardcover version and deactivated the "sam@beopen.com" email address, because it no longer works.

Fixed copyright on Index page to make it conform with the copyright on the back of the title page in Free as in Freedom. All derivative or copied versions of material on this site should include the following copyright notice:


Copyright (C) 2002 Sam Williams. St. Ignucius photograph (C) Wouter van Oortmerson.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being no invariant sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being no invariant sections, and with the Back-Cover text being no invariant sections. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled Appendix C, GNU Free Documentation License. All images are to be included verbatim when the document is copied, distributed, or modified under the terms of the GFDL.


Note: I deleted the second sentence: "Cover photograph of Richard Stallman (C) Sam Ogden/Photo Researchers, Inc. and cannot be used with permission," because I did not use this photograph. Publishers who want to use this photograph must contact Sam Ogden/Photo Researcher, Inc. to get permission and should reinsert this sentence.

Note 2: I'm not too comfortable with the final sentence of this copyright. At the time of its writing, Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O'Reilly, was concerned that the GFDL was not explicit enough about photo images. I think this sentence was an attempt on O'Reilly's part to be as generous with the photographs as they were with the text. Unfortunately, it reads to me as if the photographs must be included in all derivative or copied works. This seems overly restrictive, especially since some people [including me] might want to dump the photographs in their derivative versions. For the moment, I am leaving the photographs out and sending an email to the FSF asking if this move is in violation of the GFDL.

According to the FSF page "Tips for Using the GNU Free Documentation License", digital text publishers do not have to include the full license notice on every page, but they should include it in the document's "main" file along with references to that file in subsidiary files. I am designating the FAIFzilla.org home page the main file. I will add copyright lines referring to the home page in all the subsidiary pages.

Rewrote the "Wish List Page" to provide a more comprehensive roadmap on how I think the FAIFzilla rewriting process should proceed. I added the following target milestones:


• 1.4 -- Rewrite historical chapters 6 ["Emacs Commune"], eliminating factual errors and beefing up the technical content. Emacs was and remains Stallman's signature work, and I admit I provided only the roughest outline sketch of what the software does and how it came to be. I would love it if somebody with an in depth working knowledge of the program could provide some pointers on how to get across the technical and conceptual ingenuity of Emacs. I'm also willing to accept submissions that would augment this chapter.
• 1.6 -- Rewrite Chapter 11 ["Open Source"]. Writing this chapter was difficult, because many of the events were recent or ongoing. This made it hard to separate the truly significant from the overblown. Like a lot of journalists covering the open source/free software "schism," I tended to emphasize personal rivalries and quotations over more subtle developments in the technical realm. I'm hoping that as the events of 1995-1999 fade into the background it will be easier put those events in historical context.
• 1.7 -- Rewrite Chapter 13. ["Continuing the Fight"]. This chapter was the last delivered, and it shows. My intention was to analyze Stallman's work from the historical perspective. Are the values of "freedom" and "neighborliness" in sync with the traditional values espoused by the Constitutional framers or are they simply one of many interpretations? I would like to fold in more of Eben Moglen's thoughts on the difficulty of software from a legal perspective, an examination of past examples -- eg. strikes, player piano roles, corporations -- that forced to courts to reshift their interpretation of the law. A lead-in chapter on the FSF would probably help set those thoughts up.
• 1.8 -- Rewrite or update remaining chapters.

Added the following pages to the site: "Change Log," "Reported Errors," "FAQ," "Wish List," and "Introduction to FAIFzilla" [a slightly rewritten version of the original index page. Changed the FAIFzilla.org index page, renaming the book's text as FAIFzilla 1.0. Still awaiting the creation of "Authors" page.

Fixed three HTML font errors: [Chapter 5, 50th paragraph] changed "...vis-+-vis..." to "...vis-à-vis..." [Chapter 6, 16th paragraph] Changed "...academic rÈsumÈs" to "...academic résumés."[Epilogue, 25th paragraph] Changed "cause cÈlËbre" to "cause célèbre."

Changed single dash errors on pgs. 184, 185, 195, 198, 200, 207 and 208. Fixed an HTML error in the 25th paragraph of the Epilogue. Changed "...put a call into Stallman..." to "...called Stallman..." in the next paragraph. Changed "...copy and share and the book's text..." to "...copy and share the book's text..." on pg. 194. Added Dorothea Salo's speculation that Stallman might have suffered from cubital tunnel syndrome in the late-1980s/early-1990s to end note No. 11 in Chapter 9. Fixed HTML error on "net.unix-wizards" Index link [Chapter 7].

Changed single dashes to double dashes throughout final four chapters. Rewrote some sentences to reduce the need for double dashes. Fixed two misspellings: "a encouraging" to "an encouraging" in first sentence of seventh paragraph on pg. 32, "cerified" to "certified" first sentence of third paragraph on page 135. Inserted missing "to" in "Although Torvalds had set out build a full operating system..." in first sentence of fifth paragraph, pg. 137. Made two fixes on pg. 150: changed "of model of other GNU projects" to "a mirror to the internal bickering of other GNU projects" in the last sentence of the second paragraph and "program's capabilities" to "operating system's capabilities" in the third sentence of the fourth paragraph.

Fixed factual error in Chapter 7, changed 1995 to 1985 in sentence citing the initial release of GNU Emacs [pg 105; para. 3 in book version]. Added missing word ["in"] to sentence in second paragraph on pg. 43]. Changed "trushworthy" to "trustworthy" in final sentence on pg. 114. Changed "performace" to "performance" in fourth sentence of pg. 118. Changed "C programming" to "PC programming" in the fifth paragraph of pg. 136.

Added URLs to end notes, corrected end note #5, Chapter Five. Corrected FSF definition of "Copyleft." Fixed broken link to GNU Manifesto on endnote #13, Chapter 7. Fixed multiple typos.

Fixed multiple typos and one grammatical error. Rewrote paragraphs 63 and 64 in Chapter 9 to eliminate a redundant mention of TRIX and the 1987 GNUsletter. Added a new question to the FAQ page: "How do I report a broken link?" and modified the answer to "How do I report a typo" to take into account the reporting format of the Reported Errors page.

Fixed multiple typos and grammatical errors. Added URL and http link for ESR essay "Shut up and Show Them the Code." to end note No. 4 in Chapter 8.

Chapter 4: Fixed broken "next" link at bottom of chapter.
Created a "History" page as pursuant to the requirements of the The GNU Free Documentation License.

Created a link to this new "History" page in Appendix C ["The GNU Free Documentation License"], where the license demands the inclusion of a "History" section. Modified "Table of Contents" to include a reference and link to the new "History" page.