Richard Stallman’s Fight for Software Freedom

The smartphone in your pocket is, in Richard Stallman's words, a "portable surveillance and tracking device." That's the paradox at the heart of this episode: the entire digital world runs on foundations he built, yet he refuses to participate in most of what it has become. We dig into the life, mind, and uncompromising philosophy of Richard M. Stallman, the brilliant and famously stubborn father of the free software movement.

We trace his beginnings at the MIT AI Lab, where he sat alone cloning an entire company's proprietary software output to protect a community he believed was being dismantled. We unpack the GPL, his masterstroke of copyleft licensing that legally outmaneuvered no less than Steve Jobs when NeXT tried to keep the Objective-C front end private (Stallman's lawyers told him the courts would call the maneuver subterfuge, and he forced Jobs to release it under the free license).

We also look at the absurdist humor running underneath the warfare, including the Emacs versus Vi editor wars and his self-styled sainthood of the Church of Emacs. And we cover the polarizing later years: the controversies that turned him into a lightning rod, his follicular lymphoma diagnosis and remission, and the final question the episode leaves you with: does changing the world require this level of uncompromising fixity of purpose?

Subscribe to pplpod for more deep dives into the people who built our world. Topics: Richard Stallman, RMS, free software, GNU, GPL, copyleft, MIT AI Lab, Steve Jobs, NeXT, Emacs, software freedom, open source.

Source credit: Research for this episode included Wikipedia articles accessed 5/3/2026. Wikipedia text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; content here is summarized/adapted in original wording for commentary and educational use.