https://newleftreview.org/II/113/richard-stallman-talking-to-the-mailman richard stallman TALKING TO THE MAILMAN Interview by Rob Lucas You’re widely recognized as the world’s leading campaigner for software freedom, having led the development of the gnu operating system. Today, the gnu /Linux operating system, and free (libre) software more broadly, underpin much of the internet, yet new structures have emerged that can wield a great deal of power over users. We’d like to talk to you about the present computing landscape and the political relevance of free software. But may we start by asking about your formation, as a programmer and as a thinker—how did it all begin? I grew up in Manhattan, born in 1953. I was a behavioural problem—I couldn’t go to a public school without getting in trouble—and started working with computers at an early age. In 1969, during my last year of high school, an ibm lab let me come and use their computers. In 1970 I had a summer job there. They gave me a project to do, implementing a certain algorithm to see how well it would work. I finished that in a few weeks, so they let me spend the rest of the summer being paid to write whatever I felt like. I went to Harvard to study physics, and carried on programming there. Towards the end of my first year I started visiting computer labs to look at their manuals, to see how the computers differed. When I visited the Artificial Intelligence Lab at mit, they didn’t have much by way of a manual, because they had developed their own time-sharing system. The administrator there decided to hire me more or less straight away. So although I graduated from Harvard in 1974, I had actually been an employee at mit for three years. Harvard’s computer was a lot better to play with than ibm’s, but it didn’t have a lot of memory, whereas mit’s computer at the ai Lab had plenty. Not only that, they let me change the time-sharing system; in fact, that was my job—they hired me to work on that system. I added lots of features to lots of different programs—whatever I thought of, or people suggested to me, that seemed like a good idea, I would implement and then people would use it. And this was absolutely delightful—and gratifying to make things that people used and appreciated—so I kept working there. From that point on, I did programming using the machine at mit. [...] (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))