Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who, as a company board member since the Mozilla launch, had received 150,000 shares of VA Linux stock. Stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting the Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36 million in potential wealth, Raymond penned a follow-up essay. In it, Raymond mused on the relationship between the hacker ethic and monetary wealth: Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things-accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.See Eric Raymond, "Surprised by Wealth," Linux Today (December 10, 1999).
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-001-05-NW-LF
Whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that
Raymond and other open source proponents had simply
been in it for the money, they drove home the open
source community's ultimate message: all you needed to
sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a
sensible message. Instead of fighting the marketplace
head-on as Stallman had done, Raymond, Torvalds, and
other new leaders of the hacker community had adopted a
more relaxed approach-ignoring the marketplace in some
areas, leveraging it in others. Instead of playing the
role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game
of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process.
"On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired to hijack his revolution," Raymond says. "Richard's rejection of the term open source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There are people out there who think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't believe that. It's more that he so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any threat to that as a threat to himself."
Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader. If anything, it gave Stallman new followers to convert. Still, the Raymond territoriality charge is a damning one. There are numerous instances of Stallman sticking to his guns more out of habit than out of principle: his initial dismissal of the Linux kernel, for example, and his current unwillingness as a political figure to venture outside the realm of software issues.
Then again, as the recent debate over open source also shows, in instances when Stallman has stuck to his guns, he's usually found a way to gain ground because of it. "One of Stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that's what it takes."
Murdock, for one, finds that unbudgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "You always know that he's going to be consistent in his views," Murdock says. "Most people aren't like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect that."
A Brief Journey Through Hacker Hell
Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car, waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown Kihei.
The two of us are headed to the nearby town of Pa'ia, where we are scheduled to meet up with some software programmers and their wives for dinner in about an hour or so.
It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High Performance Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities, Kihei is a one-dimensional exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down its main drag, with its endless succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a giant commercial tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side roads. With nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. 200 yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light is yellow again.