Richard Stallman - Personal Life

Personal Life

Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life to political and software activism. Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that "I've always lived cheaply ... like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."

Until around 1998, his office at MIT's AI Lab was also his residence. He was registered to vote from there. Nowadays he has a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT. His position as a research affiliate at MIT is unpaid.

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said." Stallman often wears a button that reads "Impeach God". When asked if he was Jewish, Stallman said he was "an atheist but of Jewish ancestry".

Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating "Grav-mass" on December 25. The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day on the old style calendar.

When asked about his influences, he replied that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich, and commented as well: "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did." Stallman is a Green Party supporter, and a supporter of the National Initiative proposal.

Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone, as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues. Also, Stallman avoids use of a key card to enter the building where his office is. Such a system would track doors entered and times. For personal reasons, he generally does not actively browse the web from his computer; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox, claiming to limit direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF.

In a lecture in Manchester, England on May 1, 2008, Stallman advocated paper voting over machine voting, insisting that there was a much better chance of being able to do a recount correctly if there was a paper copy of the ballots.

Stallman enjoys a wide range of musical styles from the works of Conlon Nancarrow to folk; the Free Software Song takes the form of alternative words for the Bulgarian folk dance Sadi Moma. More recently he wrote a send-up of the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, about a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians. He also enjoys music by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and Weird Al Yankovic.

Stallman is a fan of science fiction, including works by the author Greg Egan. He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions and wrote the Free Software Song while awaiting his turn to sing at a convention. He has written at least three science fiction stories, "The Right to Read," "Made for You," and "Jinnetic Engineering".

Along with his native English, Stallman is also fluent enough in French and Spanish to deliver his two-hour speeches in those languages, and claims a "somewhat flawed" command of Indonesian. He has never married.