Richard Stallman: "I Wished I Had Killed Myself"

I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because it looked interesting and important. It came in very handy when I wrote Rebel Code, since in some sense my book is a continuation of Levy's story, and his meticulous work provided me with the context for everything that happened afterwards.

So I was naturally intrigued to read Levy's recent encounters with some of the key hackers he wrote about back then, in his new Wired article "Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists".

Sadly, it is rather disappointing, the meandering parts never quite adding up to any satisfactory whole (and the section on Gates seems overly complaisant.) But it's worth reading (a) for the photos of hackers as they were then, and (b) for the following revelatory confession of RMS:

In our original interview, Stallman said, “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now, meeting over Chinese food, he reaffirms this. “I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.”

This "pain" that Stallman says he has endured makes his decision to champion tirelessly freedom and free software for all these decades all the more remarkable - and our debt to him for doing so all the greater.

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Kindling a Conflagration

There's one of Steven Levy's finer big pieces in Newsweek about Amazon's new Kindle e-book device. It all sounds pretty cool, but for me the real showstopper is the following:

Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm not going along with it," says Penguin's Peter Shanks of Amazon's low price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such books. But Bezos says that he can sustain this scheme indefinitely. "We have a lot of experience in low-margin and high-volume sale—you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." Nonetheless the major publishers (all of whom are on the Kindle bandwagon) should loosen up. If you're about to get on a plane, you may buy the new Eric Clapton biography on a whim for $10—certainly for $5!—but if it costs more than $20, you may wind up scanning the magazine racks.

What planet are these people on? Amazon is shipping electrons - well known for being rather cheap (here, take a few trillion for free). When you buy a book, you're buying mashed-up trees that cost something (which in fact cost rather more than you pay). E-books will never take off until publishers are prepared to throw their analogue business models on the fire.

Update: Almost needless to say, Kindle is powered by GNU/Linux.

Leveraging Levy

I was pleased to see that Steven Levy, author of the definitive Hackers book on where it all started, has declared himself on the side of the angels when it comes to the Net neutrality discussions (I won't dignify the misinformation put about by those with vested interests with the name of "argument"). It's short but definitely sweet. (Via SmartMobs.)