Crucially it was release by Williams under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing others to create and share derived works.Īn aside here-the GFDL tried to do for prose what the GPL had done very successfully for software, creating an intellectual commons whose shared nature was protected by subverting the same copyright restrictions often used to alienate creative works. “Free as in Freedom” was a biography of Stallman, written by Sam Williams and published in 2002 by O’Reilly and Associates at a time when they were still somewhat supportive of the free software movement. Very much a strange loop, even in a particularly self-referential community that has self-expanding acronyms (GNU’s Not Unix) to multiple depths (Hurd stands for Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons, where Hird stands for Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth). It is a book about RMS, copyleft, and intellectual freedom, that only exists because of RMS, copyleft, and intellectual freedom. For the purpose of this article I will focus on two of his books: “Free as in Freedom (2.0)”, and “Free Software, Free Society” (third edition).ĭouglas Hofstadter would recognise “Free as in Freedom (2.0)” as a metacircular reference. RMS is, of course, a prolific writer of software ( Emacs, GCC, Texinfo, GDB, GNU Make), of copyleft licenses (the GPL, LGPL, GFDL), emails, and awkwardly pedantic, sometimes plain offensive missives regarding whether words are being used with the meanings he perceives to be correct. Somehow we managed not to mention him by name in the issue on Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. It would be inappropriate to have an issue on software licensing without including one of the people whose work has done most to shape the topic.
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